alt Hacker News$500B is a lot of debt, it's comparable to the three largest car companies' debt.
It's still not super huge compared to the amount of debt in other industries, but I guess the thought is it's riskier?
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The reason it is so noteworthy is because these companies are based upon valuations which assume mostly debt free companies with giant free cash flows. If Google starts to look like Ford a lot of the assumptions around why it’s worth so much money go out the window. Of course we’re not there but this is a change in direction which is new and noteworthy.
500B on software would be a lot. On infrastructure, it really isnt.
We spent this much (without adjusting for inflation), in 5-10 years on telecom build out in the lead up to the dot com crash. I'm fairly sure that there is still leftover capacity in the ground (dark fiber) today that we can leverage.
Smell like a bubble yet?
Looking back to that pre 2000's era, SUN was running on 50% margins, Cisco at 68%
Nvidia, 70% (and MS openly admits that they have GPU's on shelves not making money: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-has-ai-... ) Micron (memory) 70%, SK Hynix (SSD's) 70%.
For as much fun as the dot com bubble was, for as hard as the pop was, what came after was MUCH better. This burst is going to be brutal, and the sooner it happens the sooner we can move on to actual (sane) innovation, that leverages this build out.
Debt is directly tied with the ability to repay it, if the cash flow is enough to keep paying it, it's not a big issue, but thing can go horribly pretty fast if someone start having cash problems.