In the initial years of the AI boom, comparisons to the dot-com bubble didn’t make much sense. Three years in, growing levels of debt are making them ring a little truer. Early on, wealthy tech companies were opening their wallets to out-joust each other for leadership in artificial intelligence. They were spending cash generated largely from advertising and cloud-computing businesses. There was no debt-fueled splurge on computing and networking infrastructure like the one that inflated the bubble 2½ decades ago. While big tech companies are still at AI’s forefront and are in solid financial shape, a crop of more highly leveraged companies is ushering in an era that could change the complexion of the boom. A few smaller companies—most prominently CoreWeave have been relying on creative financing to vault themselves to the AI forefront for a while. More recently, though, the ambitions of companies such as OpenAI are poised to take leverage and mega contracts to a whole new level. OpenAI is laying the groundwork for a network of data centers that will cost at least $1 trillion over the next few years.

Full commentary : How debt is fueling the next wave of the AI infrastructure boom; an analyst estimates Oracle needs to borrow $25 billion ayear over four years to fund its OpenAI plans.