The part of the AI boom that scares me isn’t people using ChatGPT less.
It’s what happens when the people who financed all this spending need their money back.
Look at what is happening around Anthropic.
The company is reportedly heading toward an IPO that could value it close to $2 trillion.
At the same time, Broadcom is reportedly working on as much as $100 billion of debt financing tied to AI chip infrastructure for Anthropic and other AI companies.
Think about that for a second.
We keep hearing about how much demand there is for AI.
But somebody still has to pay for all these GPUs.
The data centers.
The power.
The networking.
The debt.
And eventually the investors who put the money in need an exit.
That’s why the Anthropic IPO is so interesting to me.
If you can build a private AI company at a massive valuation, raise billions, borrow billions more, lock up the shares and then eventually bring it to the public market…
who exactly is the buyer at the end?
Retail?
Index funds?
401(k)s?
Mutual funds?
Everybody who wasn’t there when the original money went in?
This is where the AI trade starts looking less like a technology story and more like a capital markets story.
And there is already a lot of capital tied to it.
Nvidia is financing customers.
Broadcom is helping arrange huge AI infrastructure debt.
Private equity is financing data centers.
The hyperscalers are spending hundreds of billions on infrastructure.
Then the AI labs are preparing to tap the public market.
Everyone is connected.
And if the AI labs can’t generate enough cash from their models to justify all this spending, the problem doesn’t stay inside OpenAI or Anthropic.
It moves back through the people who financed them.
That’s the part I think people are missing.
A company doesn’t have to go bankrupt for investors to get hurt.
The valuation can simply stop going up.
The debt still has to be paid.
The GPUs still depreciate.
The data centers still need customers.
The investors still want liquidity.
And suddenly everybody who bought the story at $1 trillion needs someone willing to buy it at $2 trillion.
That’s why I’m watching the Anthropic IPO much more closely than another AI benchmark.
Because if the IPO becomes the exit ramp for the private AI boom, the question changes.
It’s no longer:
How big can AI become?
It’s:
Who is left holding it when the early money wants out?
And that could tell us a lot more about the AI trade than another model leaderboard ever will.