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Zeitgeist — a spike by Chris Gathercole
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Credit Crunch

Newsletter · Watch/Read · (gathered 2026-10-14)

  • The AI bubble is fundamentally unsustainable because major AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, along with their infrastructure providers, cannot realistically secure the massive, ongoing debt needed at viable rates.
  • Rising 10-Year Treasury rates (5.3%+) and widening credit “spreads” are making all debt prohibitively expensive, compounded by AI labs’ negative EBITDA (e.g., OpenAI -$20.92B in 2025) and lack of assets, which will force them into high-yield junk debt markets for their hundreds of billions in non-cancellable compute commitments.
  • Key hyperscalers (Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Amazon) and chipmakers (Broadcom) are dangerously exposed through multi-billion dollar deals and commitments to these financially unstable AI labs, with investor sentiment for data center projects becoming “more selective.”
  • The widespread assumption that the AI boom will continue ignores the “hard mathematics,” portending catastrophic earnings misses for hyperscalers, a collapse in NVIDIA’s revenue, and widespread insolvency for AI startups and data center projects, with global economic consequences.