Alphabet

A Nikkei investigation puts five US tech giants' off-balance-sheet AI debt at $1.65 trillion, an eightfold jump in four years that now tops the $1.35 trillion they report outright, mostly through data-center leases and GPU deals that never touch a debt line.

On HN, the fight moved past the number to who eats the loss if AI demand disappoints: one reply blamed the banks; a sharper reply said the real exposure sits with private credit funds most readers have never heard of.

The fine punishes deals that forced Google's apps onto Android phones via pre-installation. The US ambassador to the EU warned Europe against over-regulating its way out of the AI economy.

HN's real fight was whether antitrust even fits Google. One argument: it was built for manufacturers with prices and marginal costs, and Google has neither. A European reader called that a distinctly American way to miss the point — here, antitrust was never mainly about price.

Apollo's chief economist published a deck claiming the Magnificent Seven are starting to underperform, with AI capex projected to balloon roughly 70% past $700B this year while shareholders see no return. A Google staff engineer in the thread flagged the real bombshell on page 25: 60% more US data centers are now planned or under construction.

The catch: half the room called the headline a chart crime. 'You can't draw any conclusions from one month of market data,' one ETF specialist wrote, especially with a giant IPO distorting the window.