Marketplace Tech

The Big Tech companies driving the AI boom are expected to spend more than $700 billion on data center infrastructure this year. To finance this spending spree, they're increasingly looking to debt.

Hyperscalers like Alphabet, Oracle, and Meta have been issuing corporate bonds at a scale the industry has never seen — nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars this year so far. The bond market could be considered a less risky way than stocks for investors to get a piece of the AI hype.

To explain what the flood of AI debt means for the bond market, we’re joined by Julie Ask, an independent industry analyst at Ask Advisory.

More on this:

“The Quarter-Trillion-Dollar Onslaught of AI Bonds Is Testing Investors’ Limits” from the Wall Street Journal
“AI has taken over the stock market. The bond market is next.” from The Economist

As top AI firms race to develop a “superintelligent” agent — one that surpasses human cognition — are they prioritizing safety guardrails along the way?

Not according to the Future of Life Institute’s AI Safety Index, which reported that companies have gone back on their own promises to take a pause if their technology ever got close to certain risky points.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Sabina Nong, AI safety investigator at the Future of Life Institute, about what measures might ensure durable safety around AI moving forward.

Apple has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging the AI startup stole trade secrets. The iPhone maker claimed that former Apple employees were asked to bring proprietary hardware to job interviews with OpenAI, and that the company tricked manufacturers into sharing Apple design secrets.

Plus, New York state becomes the first to enact a data center moratorium, and Uber is lobbying to slow the roll of autonomous vehicles in Washington D.C. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired, to learn more.

Here’s what we talked about:

“The 6 wildest claims in Apple’s lawsuit against OpenAI” from The Verge
“OpenAI’s First Device Will Be Movable, Screenless Speaker Built as AI Companion” from Bloomberg
“New York becomes the first state to impose a data center moratorium” from Reuters
“Uber’s robotaxi lobbying effort puts it on a collision course with Waymo” from TechCrunch
“Robotaxi Riders Are Falling Asleep, Sparking Frantic 911 Calls” from Bloomberg

The attorneys general of California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey are suing Meta for $1.4 trillion, claiming the social media giant designed Facebook and Instagram to addict young users.

The case is heading to court in Oakland, California, next month. It follows a landmark verdict earlier this year: A Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable for mental health harms to a young woman who said she'd become addicted to the platforms starting at nine years old.

And there are a slew of similar cases coming down the pike. To help break this down we're joined by Gaia Bernstein, law professor at Seton Hall Univerisity and author of the book "Unwired: Gaining Control over Addictive Technologies."

Netflix may be the undisputed king of streaming, but it's facing a new challenge: "the sophomore slump." Internal data reported by Bloomberg show audiences dropping off dramatically for follow-up seasons of successful shows.

Series like "The Night Agent," "Beef" and "Avatar: The last Airbender" all lost 50% or more of their original viewers when they returned for season two. To figure out what might be going on and how Netflix could respond we called up Brandon Katz, director of insights and content strategy at Greenlight Analytics.