AI’s Hidden Debt Trap
Everyone is talking about AI like it is going to change everything. Fix climate change, solve America’s debt, reshape the world. And maybe it will. But there’s a quieter story happening behind all that hype, one that deserves a lot more attention than it’s getting.
It starts with money. Enormous amounts of it. Tech giants are pouring hundreds of billions into data centers across the world. But here’s the thing most people are missing. They aren’t actually paying for most of it themselves.
Jeff Bezos stated publicly that artificial intelligence is in an industrial bubble, but characterized it as a good bubble. He has concluded that the digital platform era is reaching maturity. The next frontier lies in applying intelligence to physical manufacturing. He was being conservative with the truth.
The SPV Game
The way it works is surprisingly simple once you understand it. Companies like Meta create what’s called a Special Purpose Vehicle. Think of it as a shell company designed to hold a single asset, in this case a massive data center. Outside investors put up most of the money, around 80% in Meta’s Hyperion deal. Meta keeps a small stake and full control over operations. The investors get steady returns from long-term lease payments. Everyone wins, at least for now.
Wall Street has jumped at this arrangement. Firms like PIMCO, BlackRock, and Apollo are all in. The pitch is compelling. Big, creditworthy tech companies locked into long contracts. Predictable cash flows. Good yields. It feels safe because the names behind it are so familiar.
But safety is a strange word to use here. Because all of it rests on a single assumption. That demand for AI is going to keep growing, without pause, for years to come.
The Danger of Numbers
The Financial Times reported $120 billion in deals like this. But that number only covers the ones we already know about. Once you factor in xAI’s massive Memphis clusters, Oracle’s GPU hubs, and CoreWeave’s ongoing expansions, the real exposure is closer to $400 or $500 billion by early 2026. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a staggering bet on AI’s future.
India’s Economic Survey took notice. It warned that a collapse in AI infrastructure could spark a global financial crisis on par with 2008. The probability is low, somewhere between 10 and 20 percent. But the consequences, if it happens, would be far-reaching in ways that are hard to overstate.
Insufficient Safeguards
These deals aren’t naive. The financiers behind them have thought about what could go wrong. They have built-in extra fiber capacity to handle dips in demand. They’ve written rent increases into contracts to keep revenues growing over time. On paper, these are reasonable precautions.
The problem is that none of them were designed for a real collapse. They handle a slowdown. They don’t handle a crash. If AI demand falls sharply, occupancy in these data centers could drop by half almost overnight. At that point the math just stops working. The lease payments dry up, the debt obligations pile up, and suddenly you’re left with billions of dollars worth of infrastructure that almost nobody wants.
And that’s the crux of it. A data center built specifically for AI workloads isn’t like a shopping mall that can be repurposed. The chips inside go stale fast. The power costs are brutal. The designs are too specialized to pivot. In a fire sale, a facility worth $10 or $20 billion today might fetch a fraction of that.
Another Subprime from 2008
If you squint, this whole setup looks a lot like 2008. Back then, banks bundled risky mortgages into complex financial products and sold them to investors who didn’t fully understand what they were buying. The risk was real, but it was hidden deep enough that almost nobody saw it coming.
The AI infrastructure boom is doing something remarkably similar. Risk is being moved off the balance sheets of the biggest tech companies and into vehicles that most people outside Wall Street have never heard of. The difference is the scale. And the fact that the assets involved, unlike houses, can’t simply be lived in by someone else if the market turns.
Bubble Burst
A bubble burst floods markets with 10-15 GW of stranded capacity (equivalent to 50+ mega-centers), dwarfing subprime’s $1.5T wipeout in asset velocity. Recovery drops below 30% long-term, as global demand (even from sovereigns) can’t absorb it without years of distress pricing.
The economic survey, is therefore being very conservative in its approach. The consequences of a bubble burst would have lasting and longer impact on global economy. But that is not the end of story.
India Story
ON 1st February 2026, India announced its fiscal policy by way of annual budget. India announced 20 years tax holiday. India rolled out the red carpet for data center investment right when the rest of the world is starting to question whether AI spending is sustainable. A 20-year tax holiday is not a small incentive. That’s a generational commitment from a government to an industry that hasn’t yet proven it can deliver on its promises.
If a global AI bubble does burst, India might become a safe harbor. Cheap land, cheap labor, and now zero tax for two decades. Stranded capacity elsewhere might find a new home here instead of sitting idle.
Data centers in the US or Europe have costs restraints. Power is expensive. Land is expensive. Labour is expensive. Why keep paying premium rates on a lease in Virginia or Oregon when you can set up in India for a fraction of the cost? Especially when Google and Microsoft are already committed to being there.
A demand crash is loud. Everyone sees it coming and can react. But a slow migration toward cheaper geographies? That erodes the value of existing SPVs almost silently. By the time the lease payments start falling short, the damage is already done.
Geographical Challenge
The West built AI infrastructure like it was building highways in the 1950s. Huge, expensive, and designed for a world where cost was secondary to speed. India is building it like a country that learned from someone else’s mistakes. Cheaper, leaner, and with the government actively subsidizing the long game.
So when that collapse comes, and it likely will, it won’t be because the world lost interest in AI. It’ll be because the world found a better place to run it. The Western model doesn’t collapse because it failed. It collapses because something else succeeded.
That’s a fundamentally different kind of crisis. In 2008 the problem was bad assets. Here the problem is that the good assets are in the wrong place. The data centers aren’t broken. They are just outcompeted. And that’s a much harder problem to fix, because you can’t restructure your way out of geography.
Survey and Budget
Thus the Survey and the Budget are one story, not two. The Survey said the global AI infrastructure model is dangerously over-leveraged. The Budget said fine, let’s build our own version before that model crashes and takes everyone with it.
The Economic Survey saw the danger first. It warned that AI infrastructure was becoming a house of cards. The government listened. And instead of trying to regulate or contain it, India chose to nurture it on its own terms.
The SPVs, the off-balance-sheet structures, the BlackRocks and PIMCOs extracting yields. The West didn’t build AI infrastructure to run AI. It built it to generate returns. A new technology became the excuse to earn. The money was always the point.
India saw that pattern clearly. The Economic Survey basically spelled it out. And the Budget responded by saying we will grow this thing instead of squeezing it.
That is the complete story.
References:
- Economic Survey of India 2026: https://www.moneycontrol.com/budget/ai-debt-bomb-economic-survey-warns-of-global-crisis-worse-than-2008-here-s-why-article-13797013.html
- The Perfect Balance Sheet: https://www.techflame.com/article?id=177810&type=1
- AI business: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/jeff-bezos-is-back-at-amazon-just-3-years-after-his-retirement-my-fears-are-there-and-/articleshow/116026924.cms
- Project Prometheus: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/technology/bezos-project-prometheus.html
- SPV explained: https://wholesale.banking.societegenerale.com/en/news-insights/glossary/spv-special-purpose-vehicle/
- Structural Lending: https://www.applebyglobal.com/publications/structured-lending-for-hyperscale-data-center-providers-offshore-spvs-powering-securitisation-driven-capital-solutions/