This week: AI is not a fad, but the way its data centres are paid for deserves an owner's attention. Also: why the end of the Green Claims Directive will fuel greenwashing, what Anthropic's listing tells us, and who really owns the AI debt. Here's the front page. Paid subscribers can download the full newspaper edition at the bottom of this post. Good morning, and happy Sunday. The key point in plain words: AI is not a fad. People and companies use it more every month. The risk is in how the building of it is paid for. Big technology companies are borrowing heavily to build data centres, and they count on a few AI companies to pay them back over many years. Here is how it works. An AI lab signs a multi-year contract for computing power it has not yet used. The cloud provider books the promise as backlog and borrows to build. In substance that is a loan. The four big platforms now report about $2.3 trillion of backlog. In May, The Information found that about half was owed by OpenAI...
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