Everyone asks who will fund AI. Few ask who pays if it burns

Synopsis The AI boom is creating data-centre campuses whose values can run into tens of billions of dollars. Financing them is one challenge. Working out how much of that risk somebody else is prepared to carry if something goes wrong is becoming another challenge. The AI boom is increasingly about what is behind the technology. Chips may attract most of the attention, but putting those chips to work requires enormous amounts of capital, power, land, and equipment, and the financial commitments around this infrastructure are getting harder to ignore. Much of the discussion so far has centred on who will…