The AI money machine wobbles: stocks, OpenAI, and a 'junk' rating
Follow-up to Wednesday Oct 28: Anthropic's IPO filing: 93 pages of AI nightmares, and a lot of moneyOn Wednesday, we read the 93 pages of risks in Anthropic's IPO filing. Now the money side answers. The FT reports that Blackstone expects Anthropic to get a high 'junk' rating from credit agencies after its IPO. A junk rating means lenders see the company as risky, so borrowing costs more. It is a forecast, not a decision.
OpenAI also raised less than half of its $30 billion target in its latest round, says the Wall Street Journal. The BBC reports sharp falls in US tech stocks over AI cost fears, with more than $1 trillion set to be wiped out. Intel's stock crash knocked $12 billion from the US government's stake. TechCrunch adds that Nvidia is weighing cosigning a loan for an Nscale data center in West Virginia.
The pressure also reaches your desk. AI is eating memory chips, and PC prices are rising. Sam Altman even said it is 'quite terrible' for RAM to sit in personal computers instead of data centers.
Huge spending, debt and negative cash flow are now real worries, not just blog talk. When a chipmaker offers to cosign loans for its own customers, the system looks fragile. And Altman's RAM comment shows a direction: less computing power owned by you, more rented from a few giants.
