Some facts
@ Death threats over data centers are tearing American towns apart Thousands of new data centers have been built to fuel the booming intelligence industry, escalating public resentment against both the energy-sucking infrastructure and AI itself is roiling small towns and suburban communities from coast to coast, a CNN investigation has found. Source c nn oct 12 , 2026
@ The Bank for International Settlements — an institution constitutionally incapable of hyperbole — compared the AI buildout to canal mania, railway mania, and the dot-com bubble, and observed that “these episodes ended with an eventual reversal in investment, inducing economy-wide recessions.”
@ Oracle stumbles, OpenAI can't pay, computing gets expensive. Lovable's costs rise, margins compress, the $13.3 billion valuation looks frothy. And European taxpayers' money has been used to endorse a bet that may not pay off.
@ The AI boom has created a circular financing system: a small group of companies invest in one another, finance their customers, buy each other's products, and then use those contracts as evidence of future growth.
@ In September 2025, Nvidia pledged up to $100 billion to OpenAI, its own largest customer, and CNBC reported the cash would mostly be used to lease Nvidia‘s own hardware. Nvidia books the sale as revenue. Its own money, returned one accounting cycle later, arriving at a valuation its own investment helped set. The $100 billion headline did its work on the stock price and then quietly evaporated: negotiations broke down in January, and by February the figure had shrunk to $30 billion. The market repriced trillions of dollars of equity around a number that was never executed at scale.
@ Oracle signed the $300 billion contract that crowned Ellison in September. Microsoft holds 27 percent of OpenAI, a stake valued around $135 billion, while selling it compute and competing against it for the same customers. AMD went further than any of them: per its own SEC filing, it granted OpenAI warrants on 160 million shares — roughly a tenth of the company — exercisable at one cent apiece, vesting as OpenAI buys its chips. A chipmaker paying its customer, in equity, for the privilege of the customer’s business.
@A related development reported by Reuters on 9 October strengthens the argument. Firmus Technologies, a data-centre developer backed by Nvidia and Blackstone, withdrew its planned IPO after seeking a valuation of nearly A$44 billion—about US$31 billion—which would have been roughly three times its August funding-round valuation. The company cited market volatility and prevailing conditions.