By that measure it doesn’t sound like that much.

You’re talking about about an amount that is a 13% of the total US government spending, of which is 20% of the entire US GDP.

I’m not saying it’s insignificant but it’s only a few percent of the US GDP and it represents spending over several years.

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mapping365 an hour ago | parent [-]

I mean that's so far, it continues to grow exponentially larger with each quarter. The debt issuance for the first half looks to be crowding out US treasuries in the bond market - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-07-23/ai-deb... - that's an extremely large amount of debt. And it's still getting larger and larger each quarter.

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jaggederest 34 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah this is going to be north of 10 trillion by the end, I would wild-ass-guess. Inflation adjusted it's larger than the manhattan project, apollo program, works progress administration, hell, it's on par with the cold war era military buildout, or a baby world war.

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refurb 40 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I would question the idea that highly industry consolidated debt is competing with risk free debt issued by the US government. Those are two very different products.

And while the quarter by quarter growth may seem astonishing it very different saying “debt levels today are alarming” versus “if this trend continues debt levels will be alarming”

	▲	mapping365 34 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		So the disclosed balance sheet debt is 1.35 trillion and then the off-balance sheet debt is 1.65 trillion for a total of 3 trillion in AI debt for the 5 tech giants so far. It's multiplying every quarter and they've set investors expectations to be that this is never ending basically. But the tech giants aren't the only people spending themselves into massive debt, think of the CoreWeaves and the Nebius and the hundreds of other smaller companies. And the expectation is that there will be a near term return on all this with a healthy profit. Those five tech giants are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the amount of debt.