AI boom's next bottleneck: "shortages of capital", lenders warn

The concern isn't that AI demand is fading — Anthropic is preparing for a $1 trillion-plus IPO and data centers keep getting built. Rather, the people who lend the money are balking. Chip shortages and power shortages have been the well-known constraints; now capital itself may become scarce, according to DBS's CEO. A financier of data centers put it bluntly, saying lenders aren't an ATM for a dystopian future.

The shift shows up in specific deals. Volta's $5 billion Norwegian data center, which months ago would have been waved through, now faces investors demanding tougher terms. CoreWeave's bonds are tanking. The cost of protection against a SpaceX default is up 80% from three months ago, and the early price talk for SpaceX's $40 billion loan is about 1 percentage point above its existing bonds.

Telecom bonds began cracking six months before the dot-com crash, and subprime mortgage bonds peaked eight months before the S&P 500 in 2007. Equity investors may keep dreaming, but lenders get paid not to lose money. OpenAI will likely still raise the $30 billion it's looking for, and equity markets will probably recover from the chip selloff — but the financing environment is tightening.