Posted on 02/08/2026 3:09:52 PM PST by fireman15
"The market has indicated this is not investment-grade debt."
It’s 2026, and tech companies continue to insist they need to spend staggering amounts of money on AI data centers. Yet for all of its enthusiasm over the past few years, Wall Street is finally starting to squint at the numbers.
According to new reporting by Business Insider, JPMorgan Chase is running into trouble finding investors interested in servicing billions in debt backing two of the first five Stargate data centers.
Stargate is Donald Trump’s $500 billion AI project led by tech companies Oracle and OpenAI. Its vague goal, OpenAI has explained, is to “secure American leadership in AI,” which will somehow “support the re-industrialization of the United States” and “provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies.”
But if JPMorgan — which led financial lenders through a $38 billion Stargate debt raise — is already struggling to sell the vision, that all might be easier said than done. Per BI, a person familiar with both data centers said they’re fully financed, though noted that banks and other investors are growing jittery about pouring even more money into the megaproject.
(Excerpt) Read more at futurism.com ...
Excel Spreadsheets were the big disruption.
In your world I am sure you are the smartest person in that world. Howsomever, there are many worlds, and there are many people like you, and some are smarter probably. Since you are not sure how to short AI, you can change that to probably lol. There are a lot of worlds out there, and you must make the assumption that a lot of those guys are smarter than you and they are right. I can relate a humorus story you might enjoy, the story of the Bonanza V35 in 1950's, that is a fascinating story and apropos to your post. goes along with what you're posting.
The rate of development change in AI tech is staggering and it’s going to get very real by 2030
I have spent $ Thousands on local hardware for working with AI platforms and models. But anyone who wants to get their feet wet with various AI models and tools can do so for free. Google Cloud Platform offers $300 of free credit good for 90 days.
https://cloud.google.com/pricing
You can set up a very powerful virtual machine using various flavors of Linux or even Windows Server for nothing. You can pick from pre-configured VMs, start with a template, or basically go on your own. There are all sorts of videos on YouTube or other sources which explain how to do this.
I guarantee that this can widen your perspective on AI.
Yes, I remember this well. But I still have a couple of trusty slide rules which though not as precise when accompanied by some mathematical knowledge can be close enough.
Recently, I was trying to work out a math problem and realized just how much algebra, trigonometry, and calculus that I have forgotten. Somehow the multiplication tables, etc. are still firmly engrained. But I went ahead and purchased some of my favorite books on these subject that I could no longer find in my library after lending them out over the years. It seems like a shame to give up the knowledge of these areas of mathematics because of lack of recent use.
Trump’s data center plan should have included each one generating its own electricity, excess to ba added back to the grid. It would help to mitigate the impact these behemoths have on our grid load.
Most of the really big AI opportunities have already been implemented by the likes of google, Amazon and Oracle
Obvious applications are things like the Waymo self driving cars and AI custom. Search/ marketing applications and financial
the Waymo self driving cars
You mean the ones guided by folks in the Philippines?
A penny for your thoughts.
OK, you win. Really did LOL. Wife asks “what’s so funny”. I’m all “I really can’t explain.”
“Why?”
“Do you know what an underpants gnome is?”
. . . .
I am familiar with Bonanza aircraft. My wife and I live on a small airport and my neighbor 2 doors down has a beautiful example in his hangar. Personally, in my advancing years I prefer our much slower, docile, less advanced Piper Cherokee for our aviation adventures.
I am curious what humorous story about Bonanzas that you are referring to. We have all made some funny quips calling it the V-Tailed Doctor Killer... but I would love it if you could tell us the story that you are referring to.
Everyone gets the God, or bloated socialist Gaia Pope, they deserve, and that's a good thing. Having a personal AI Jesus running locally on a pocket phone that someone can chat with endlessly, and are never asked to donate a dime to, will be a net good thing for many people. Most Demonrats need a stern tyrant court-ordered ankle bracelet God that reliably fires off a quarter inch bolt of lightning the instant they start to commit another crime. Of course evil will stay one step ahead. An incel with zero charisma nor womanagement skills will be able to order a mini-surveillance-state AI system off Alibaba, and maybe a couple Uyghur breeders without kidneys, and become a doomsday cult leader.
I am reminded of the build out of railroads in the US in the 1880’s -1890’s. Thousands of investors in Europe lost everything when it all went bust. “Steaks of rust” they were called.
Various generations can differ substantially, and just when you think you know which model works the best in various scenarios... one of the providers comes out with something new which can be a game changer.
But the thing that you do not see is any of them approaching something even close to human thinking... which is called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Nothing like this is known to exist currently, and especially not Artificial Superintelligence (ASI). These are the sci-fi type developments that many people are very fearful of. No one knows when or if this development will actually occur any time in the near future.
Until that time more and more models will be developed with specific purposes in mind and yes Google, Amazon, and Oracle will likely be in the game for quite a while longer, but there are other players, some of them in places like China which likely have malevolent intent. I don't think that we can be confident that the real eventual breakthrough which will come close to AGI will come from the three that you have mentioned. I am not sure that spending even $Trillions on infrastructure will make this more likely to happen.
It seems like this type of breakthrough is likely to come from someone brilliant who is thinking completely outside of the box. The big corporations are not necessarily any more likely to come up with this type of revolutionary development. Just enlarging and refining larger and larger models no longer seems like it is going to get us there.
I think modern-day LLMs, are the “78 records” of AI, down the road, they will become much more powerful.
You said it yourself, the V-tailed doctor killer. Why did it kill so many doctors? Cuz doctor’s wanted of the best and the fastest aircraft at the end of the world war II and they wanted to get rich and show off. So they bought this very sophisticated airplane, and being very smart they knew that they could fly into IMC conditions without fear. After all, they were doctors and really smart. So they go into IMC, they lose orientation, they start a turn, it turns into a spiral, and they either crash into the earth or they pull back really hard and the wings come off and they turn into a missile that crashes into the earth. The parallel was sometimes you’re not as smart as you think you are.
yeah
That is an interesting thought, but there are currently LLMs which are incredibly powerful and sophisticated. OpenAI’s GPT 5 cost over $500 Million to develop. $Hundreds of Millions have been spent by Google on various Gemini versions including $192 Million spent on Gemini Ultra 1.0. Both of them were surpassed by Claude Opus 4.6 from Anthropic. We do not know how much was spent on that model, but Anthropic is expected to spend $12 Billion in development costs in 2026 and $23 Billion in 2027. Anthropic is expected to lose $5-7 billion in 2026 and likely more in 2027.
I don't know if with this amount of money being spent if comparing current LLMs are a good comparison to 78RPM records. A bunch of these companies are making bets that likely will not pay off and could easily result in the company's total failure. What I am wondering is how much money will the Federal Government be willing to spend to keep these companies from failing.
As an interesting sidenote... according to the latest version of Gemini about $20 Billion in 2024 dollars were spent producing and manufacturing 78 records from 1898 to the late 1950s this includes all expenses including record company executives to janitors, to all of the performers. Who knows how accurate that is.
Just saying down the road when we look back, todays LLM models will pale in comparison.
I assumed that this likely had something to do with what you were referring to but thought that there might be something else.
Our next-door neighbor on the other side of our house, gave me a ride in his super-fast and powerful Mooney right after he got it. We have obstructions on both ends of our field, so he skimmed the trees coming in and didn't get the plane down on the runway until the opposite end was looking uncomfortably close. I don't want to jynx myself, but I feel a lot safer in our Piper Cherokee. I can instantly manually pull in 40 degrees of flaps and if I crab it a little it drops in like a rock when needed.
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