The world's richest companies are borrowing to buy GPUsPremium: The Hater's Guide To AI Debt (Part 1)

In 2026 the biggest technology companies on earth are doing something fairly absurd: burning through cash and buying more chips anyway.

Profitable companies, borrowing to spend

Oracle, Google and Amazon have gone cash-flow negative, with Meta close behind. The GPUs they buy are enormously expensive, the data centers take years to build and power up, and running AI services is costly in its own right.

Meanwhile the revenue — selling AI software, renting out compute — sits in the single-digit billions. Hundreds of billions go out; a rounding error comes back.

The newcomers built to buy chips

A breed of 'neoclouds' exists purely to borrow money, buy GPUs and build data centers; some started life as Bitcoin and Ethereum mines. They have promised gigawatts of capacity while their revenues remain a footnote to what leaves the door.

Everyone says they are building the infrastructure of the future, but the money has not shown up as revenue, and it has not eased the strain on cash.

The queue for credit keeps getting longer

In 2026 alone, AI-related debt issuance passed $500 billion, through plain bonds, special purpose vehicles and convertible notes. Blackstone, BlackRock and several big Japanese banks keep turning up in the same deals.

The trouble is that interest rates are rising and so are chips: Nvidia raised prices 15% after memory costs spiked, dragging up the price of everything else that goes into a data center. Everyone still has to borrow — and borrowing keeps getting more expensive.

In one line: this is not building the future, it is putting the future's bill on today's card.