全部文章0
Hacker Newstechnewssss··访问 1

AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt

原网页

Article URL: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-companies-hide-debt-off-balance-sheet

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49020999

Points: 538

# Comments: 255

Hacker News 讨论

538 points · 255 comments · 查看原帖

  1. senshan

    As long as this debt does not make it into life insurance and pension funds, we are fine. The trouble is that private credit is taking control of some life insurance companies and off-loads this debt to these. When these fail, it will become everyone's problem. > Risks to financial stability may also stem from entities with particularly high exposure to private credit markets, such as insurers influenced by private equity firms and certain groups of pension funds. The assets of private‐equity‐controlled insurers have grown significantly in recent years, with these entities owning significantly more exposure to less‐liquid investments than other insurers https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/gfsr/2024/apr... https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/gfsr/2024/apr...

  2. wongarsu

    Do they? Is a company with $200 billion annual revenue and earnings (EBITDA) of $100 billion having $420 billion of off-balance-sheet debt really staggering? In many other industries that would be a perfectly normal amount of debt to have. It's only unusual because we are used to tech companies having so much cash on hand they don't know where to put it

  3. chasd00

    Are they really "trying to hide" this debt? I think it's pretty common knowledge that a lot of these companies are using debt/bonds for funding. The debt not showing up where the author wants is a reporting formality not an attempt to hide it.

  4. andreygrehov

    Is that why China pushing for open weight models? If these models are on par with the quality of the proprietary ones, the US stock market will go south fairly fast, imho.

  5. FabHK

    If you're talking about dodgy accounting at hyperscalers, a larger worry might be that they are overstating profits by depreciating their assets (such as datacenters and CPUs/GPUs) too slowly. Estimates are that this could overstate profits by tens of percent. (However, this only allows earnings to be "pulled forward" - sooner or later the servers must be written off and the accounting catches up.) See e.g. https://deepquarry.substack.com/p/depreciation-of-gpus-betwe... https://www.ft.com/content/0dbfe94f-2136-432c-b075-4587092de... Michael “The Big Short” Burry: > Understating depreciation by extending useful life of assets artificially boosts earnings -one of the more common frauds of the modern era. https://x.com/michaeljburry/status/1987918650104283372

  6. jimnotgym

    If I were nearing retirement and had a decent pension pot where I could control it in fine detail...I would be diversifying away from tech stocks and holding some cash for immediate needs. There probably won't be much time when it unravels...I wouldn't be over exposed to the Nasdaq 100, for instance. Although you could probably pick some AI safe companies out of it. The real problem will be figuring out where all this debt is

  7. JohnMakin

    > Meta alone has amassed around $420 billion in off-balance-sheet debt, according to Nikkei, Isn't this an existential type of bet?

  8. Havoc

    Would have been nice if the article had any substantive facts in it