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BBT #20 | AI's Hidden Debt, China's Rise, and Who Gets Erased
Follow the money far enough and it always leads somewhere uncomfortable. This week we follow it — from who's actually paying for the AI boom, to who gets erased when the world throws a party.
We open in our lane: the money behind the machines. Everyone talks about AI models, but almost nobody talks about how the compute gets paid for — the debt markets, the GPU-backed loans, the borrowing that's quietly propping up the whole boom. Then we get into the rise of Chinese AI models that are landing at a fraction of the cost of the leading Western ones, and what that price gap means for who ends up…
The skinny
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