CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Timing of the AI Bubble Burst and the Subprime Collapse

Photograph Source: Dietmar Rabich – CC BY-SA 4.0

I read this Substack column last week comparing the timing of subprime resets in 2006-08 to the payments that the AI companies will soon have to make for data centers as they open. (Sorry, I would credit the author, but I don’t know who Mr. or Ms. Groundbreaker is.) Most data centers are being constructed with contracts with the AI producers where they first start having to pay lease obligations when the data centers become operational.

Anyhow, I was first taken by the argument, which is essentially that the timing of the collapse of the housing bubble was an entirely predictable event, because we knew that the teaser rates on hundreds of billions of dollars in subprime loans were due to reset to much higher rates starting in 2006, with the volume rising in 2007 and 2008. Since millions of homeowners would be unable to pay the higher reset rate, their mortgages would soon go into delinquency and default. The column sees this as parallel to the trillions of dollars of lease obligations that the AI companies will have to start paying as more data centers start operating in 2027 and 2028.

That originally struck me as a neat parallel, but then I remembered a bit more of the housing bubble history. It’s true that millions of people with subprime mortgages hit a wall in 2007-08 when their teaser rates reset to much higher rates, but that was not a wall that first got erected in........

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