Big tech's AI spending is being funded by mountains of borrowed money, and a crash could hit far beyond the tech companies themselves.

• The biggest AI players are deep in debt and still asking for more — Broadcom is hunting $50 billion for OpenAI chips, SpaceX $40 billion for Nvidia chips, and Oracle is also raising money for chips.
• Much of that debt is hidden off the books; five big tech companies owe an estimated $1.65 trillion that never shows on their balance sheets, and the IMF has started warning about it.
• Oracle is the weak link: S&P cut its credit rating to one step above junk, and banks are quietly dumping its data center loans at a discount because they think they're toxic.
• The danger is not any single failed project but the leverage behind it all, the same setup as 2008 — one borrower missing a payment can knock over banks, and then ordinary companies can't borrow to make payroll.
• Pensions and retirement accounts now hold pieces of this, so regular savers are exposed, and there is little public appetite for another bailout of billionaires and their lenders.

Outlook: Expect more pressure on Oracle's loans and credit rating, with the warning that any small failure could set off a chain reaction far worse than 2008.