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Nassim Taleb put it best: “It’s foolish to say what color truck is going to break a fragile bridge. But it is not foolish to say this bridge is fragile, it’s going to break one day… What areas of fragility do you see right now?”

Sascha Steffen points to “financing” as the key metric (lnkd.in/exT7Njca). But looking at the structure of that financing, the setup has a distinct flavor of the 2008 GFC. We are seeing risk laundering, i.e. moving real economic risk to places where it becomes less visible, without removing it.

Mapping the financing plumbing instead of asset prices reveals uncomfortable parallels. Here is the 2008 vs. 2025 structural map:

🏠 The Asset

  • 2008 (Housing): Prices inflated because “real estate always goes up.”
  • 2025 (H100 Chips): Prices inflated because “everyone needs compute.”

💸 The “Subprime” Borrower

  • 2008 (NINJA): No Income, No Job, but given a mortgage.
  • 2025 (Startups): No Profit, High Burn, but given “Cloud Credits” to rent chips.

🏦 The Enabler (Shadow Banks)

  • 2008 (SIVs): Off-balance sheet entities that held toxic mortgages so banks looked clean.
  • 2025 (“Neoclouds”): Entities (like CoreWeave or even Oracle) holding the hard debt/depreciation risk so traditional hyperscalers do not have to.

🔄 The Circularity

  • 2008 (Home Equity): Using rising home prices to borrow cash to pay the mortgage.
  • 2025 (Vendor Financing): Big Tech invests in a startup → Startup pays Big Tech for cloud → Big Tech books “Revenue Growth.”

The Fragile Bridge: The genius of the current setup is not just the technology; it is the tranching of risk.

Look at the Oracle/OpenAI deal.

  • Microsoft (Cash Rich) keeps the “AAA Tranche”: The IP and customer layer. Shielded from infrastructure debt, but if the underlying asset (OpenAI) fails, their growth narrative—and share price—may collapse with it.
  • Oracle (Leveraged) takes the “Equity Tranche”: They absorb the “First Loss” risk. They are issuing billions in bonds to build data centers for a tenant that is effectively a capped-profit startup with a venture-grade balance sheet. If the tenant stops paying, the bonds remain, but the specialized assets depreciate toward zero.

The system looks well-capitalized at the top, but that safety relies on the “Round-Trip” of dollars at the bottom. If organic demand does not materialize to pay for infrastructure, collateral (chips) and loans backing them become the fragility point.

The question is not whether it is a bubble. The question is: What happens when the circular financing loop hits real-world cash-flow limits? That is where a system with hidden leverage breaks.

P.S.: Meanwhile, Google is largely outside this domino structure (Vertical integration + TPUs = Independence from the Nvidia collateral chain).