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Comment by bkandel | Hacker News Reader

The logic here is so flawed it suggests to me a significant lack of financial understanding. For example:

>If the AI industry has to pay off 5 trillion dollars over the course of 20 years, that's 250 billion dollars a year. For context, Alphabet (parent company of Google and Youtube) reported earning almost 162 billion dollars of revenue just in 2019. Adjusted for inflation, that's an even more impressive 213 billion dollars.

Alphabet's REVENUE was $162B, not earnings! You can't use all your revenue to pay off your debts because you have to use some of your revenue to pay operating and other expenses. So even if AI generates as much revenue as Alphabet did in 2019 (adjusted for inflation), there is no chance it could pay back $250B/year.

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I just read Alphabet's net income to be $132 billion for 2025. Their revenue was $403 billion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Inc.

I'm definitely in the "its a bubble" side of things, but I do think its also worth a note that every company I see is spending significantly more on AI than they ever spend on all the services offered by Alphabet and its not even close.

Your point is valid, but there is a flaw in the premise. They don't need to pay off the $5 trillion in 20 years. They just need to be able to service it. If they can use that debt to bootstrap the company, as long as they can pay the interest and issue new debt, they can keep that $5 trillion on the books longer than either of us will be alive

I suspect if you go back to look at say, Microsoft's books from when they went public to today they have never been debt free

All of the data up to this thread show that there is not enough revenue on the current uptake trajectory to service this debt, nor will there be (through some combination of generative AI not being that revolutionary from a productivity perspective and open weight options).

Could this change? Maybe. That's the bet.

For sure, I wasn't giving an opinion on whether or not they could service the debt, but servicing it is a much different bar they have to meet vs. actually paying it off

AI Bubble: The Calls are Coming From Inside the House: Apollo and Ares Research Torches AI Debt Hype - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50437784 - November 2026

Nearly every bit of logic here demonstrates a gross misunderstanding of the entire industry.

No acknowledgement of rising energy costs and problems accessing it.

Thinking you can just “turn off free users to save costs” (screw having a pipeline, I guess).

Not understanding the bespoke nature of data centers as it relates to the finite-living chips they’re designed for.

No acknowledgement of interest rates to service the massive debt they take on over the extremely long build times of the data centers.

No recognition of open weight models severely undercutting the American leaders.

This whole thing seems to be written on vibes.

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