Im pushing back on the „sophisticated companies“, I don’t mean to say they are committing actual fraud. My point was that Enron finances were extremely complicated, on purpose, to hide the fact it was a massive fraud. Before collapse Enron was talked about as one of the most innovative and successful company ever. People who should have known better assumed the company would of course not put itself in a bad situation by committing the most flagrant fraud ever.

For the AI bubble too many people assume that large companies having a stake in it will of course know what they are doing, be careful and not expose themselves too much or do wild bets that don’t pay off. But looking at the level of capex from hyperscalers, the amount of circular financing by NVIDIA/google/microsoft, the level of debt raised for datacenters (and its associated raising interest rates), the lack of moat for AI labs, the absurd AI labs valuations, OpenAI ever increasing infra expenditure commitments (we are at more than $750B for 2030), Oracle dire situation (to say the least), the mounting pressure from China/open models, and the fact that 2 companies represent the vast, vast majority of the compute demand. None of that looks like a healthy, sustainable industry. In fact it looks like the most obvious financial engineering ever, where the only ones benefitting are NVIDIA, memory manufacturers, and hyperscalers. And they are doing what is necessary to keep the game going. If the demand for AI vendors isn’t increasing massively in the coming years the whole thing will go down. And the level of demand required need to be pretty much the AI booster dreams where everything becomes agentic everywhere. Short of that we are very likely to see things go downhill