A Fed official is asking whether AI is becoming 'too big to fail'

The sheer scale of the buildout and debt load requires incredible scrutiny. But there's a few reasons why this isn't the radioactive bomb it might intuitively seem like.

One, tech isn't a massive employer. The people being employed in all the downstream businesses, the contractors, electricians, etc are in classically cyclical businesses. If this all goes south, this might not be the employment dip that starts a broad recession. Two, the debt is largely being issued by companies with some of the greatest balance sheets in the world. While the CoreWeaves etc of the world would face elimination, the classic big techs probably wouldn't. Three, it matters who the counterparty is. Right now the debt is distributed through private credit, Wall Street banks, REITs, mutual funds, etc. The contagion would reach through private credit to their LPs like pensions, insurance funds etc but as far as we know these funds are not hyper leveraged and over-indexed toward AI.

But yeah the sheer scale of the debt load just cannot be ignored.

We are only ever one computer science paper or github repo away from all of their moat fading to dust anyways. The question everyone financial should be asking is “what happens when folks don’t _need_ to pay these people anymore?”

It is certainly far too big to succeed.

"Too big to fail" should trigger anti-trust and be broken up.