The thing about AI is that the GPUs show up before the revenue does. Financing the future would be a wonderful business if the future would agree to arrive before the interest payment. So credit bridges the gap, and lenders are getting pickier about what they'll bridge. There's a CoreWeave bond yielding roughly 15%. There's a five-year loan against customer contracts averaging three years, which is a meaningful allocation to optimism. Three customers make up 72% of revenue, so a lot of different loans quietly depend on the same people paying their compute bills. Meanwhile Meta, a formidable cash machine attached to a slightly more formidable shopping list, is selling equity. SpaceX has a roughly $40B GPU lease commitment, which is committed financing, not $40B sitting in a bank account. The bear case doesn't need AI to be useless. It just needs the cash to arrive late. New in The Sequence Opinion, "The AI Credit Crunch" 👇