Big Tech is borrowing like never before

krupan 60 points 50 comments June 20, 2026
startupfortune.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (9 comments)

dgellow

Full title: "Big Tech is borrowing like never before and the Fed just made that a lot more expensive"

xnx

Smart to borrow when money is cheap if you think you can do something more profitable with it.

carterschonwald

“sit with” is way over used lately

Mistletoe

A good read when X is "borrowing like never before". https://pivotal.substack.com/p/minsky-moments-in-venture-cap...

smrtinsert

Is it me? I feel like we are entering an era where it has become possible for one of the big companies to fail.

dmoy

$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?

ElProlactin

The NVIDIA case is such a strange example to use to make the argument the author is trying to make. NVIDIA raised $25 billion and had $85 billion in orders. Because of the demand, it was able to upsize its offering and issue bonds in maturities ranging from 2 to 30 years at quite favorable interest rates. The amount raised is a quarter of a year's free cash flow and the spread tightened during the book building process, so bond investors obviously aren't on the same page as the author. You really can't make a bearish argument about the amounts being raised without putting the numbers in perspective. Yes, the issuances are big, but the equity and cashflows are also big, so the amounts being raised in the bond market don't really align to the author's skepticism when it comes to NVIDIA, Google, Meta. The author would have a stronger case with Oracle but that alone wouldn't support the "Big Tech" story line. Edit: $25 billion is a quarter's worth of free cash flow for NVIDIA, not half a year's as I originally stated.

0xcafefood

https://www.inc.com/fast-company-2/oracle-ai-boom-hidden-deb... goes into more detail about this same issue.

krupan

And now SpaceX, who is not at all in the same financial situation as Nvidia, wants to borrow money too: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/spacex-banker...

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