Fireship’s Code Report argues that the AI money machine looks shaky in some places and solid in others. If your site relies on AI plugins, chatbots or API-based tools, the pricing and stability of those tools depend on how this plays out.
How the chip financing loop works
Fireship explains the risk with a simple chain. Nvidia makes an expensive GPU, and a buyer can’t afford it. Nvidia puts in money in exchange for a share of the buyer’s company, on the condition that the money buys Nvidia GPUs.
That money covers only part of the cost, so the buyer borrows the rest from Wall Street, using the not-yet-bought GPUs as collateral. Banks accept this because Nvidia has promised to rent the GPUs itself if nobody else does.
The result is a loop. Nvidia’s money buys Nvidia chips, those chips get rented back to Nvidia, and Nvidia’s stock rises. Nvidia then invests in more companies, which borrow more to buy more chips. Wall Street calls this circular financing. Fireship names CoreWeave as the best-known example, with a few other companies doing the same.
His view is that the loop works while the chips rent for more than they lose in value. It also needs AI labs to keep buying and lenders to keep lending.
What changed in three weeks
Fireship says all of that held until recently. CoreWeave borrowed $52 billion to buy chips and is now paying 15% interest on that debt. He also says it is now worth a third of what it was at the start of the month.
He reports that Elon Musk said debt markets have almost shut off for any company whose only revenue is AI data centres. Musk expects more than 200 of these “neo-cloud” companies to die. Fireship adds that SpaceX is safe because it also sells rockets.
Other warning signs he lists:
- Meta created a new class of non-voting stock to pay for GPUs.
- Microsoft offered a quarter of its employees money to leave, so it could afford more chips.
- Jensen Huang had been telling people that demand for AI chips was insatiable.
These are Fireship’s claims about recent events. Treat them as one commentator’s reading of the news.
Fireship says Anthropic filed to go public and asked for $100 billion. In his telling, that would value it above 492 of the 500 companies in the S&P 500. He says four of the remaining seven companies are the ones it rents compute from, and that it owes $265 billion through 2045.
He describes the S-1 as 330 pages, with 90 pages of risk factors. He says it admits that several earlier incidents are true. It also says Claude now helps improve itself, and that the company might not notice its models getting much smarter until after it has happened.
Other reports on the filing differ in detail. They describe a confidential draft S-1 announced on June 1, 2026. Share count and price were not yet set, and any listing depends on market conditions.
Those reports also cite a $65 billion Series H round at a $965 billion post-money valuation. They say annualised revenue passed $47 billion in June 2026, a company-reported figure.
They also point to risks. One is a legal challenge over the Pentagon’s supply-chain-risk label, which Anthropic says could put billions in revenue at stake. Another is a projected operating margin of only about 5%, which compute costs could squeeze.
On compute, Anthropic has agreements with Amazon, Google, Broadcom and SpaceX for over 10 gigawatts of new capacity. AWS is the primary training and cloud partner.
Why site owners may come out ahead
Fireship’s view is “it depends.” A business that borrows from one company only to hand the money back is in a weak spot. Even so, he says it is hard to call AI a bubble the day after OpenAI claimed one of its models disproved a 27-year-old conjecture that half of complexity theory is built on.
For developers and site teams, he sees good news. AI companies are competing to sell subsidised tokens, which means cheap access to models. He mentions an open model from Ikemi that came within a point of Opus at half the price. He also expects financed GPUs to show up on eBay soon.
The practical lesson is to use cheap tokens while they last, and to avoid building a business on a single vendor. Ask what happens to your site if a tool’s price changes or the provider struggles.
Fireship’s sponsor segment shows one way to use the tokens. It describes a room of agents where one triages new issues, one drafts pull requests and one writes the change log. They hand work to each other and ask a human only when approval is needed. You can sign in with an existing ChatGPT plan instead of adding another subscription.
Limits of this story
Much of the bubble talk rests on one creator’s summary of fast-moving news. The other reports I read do not cover the CoreWeave interest rate, the neo-cloud warnings or the Meta and Microsoft moves. I could not verify those from them.
The sources also disagree on the filing itself. The figures above come from a confidential-filing story, while Fireship describes a public S-1 with specific page counts. The reports call the $965 billion valuation a private-round figure, not a public market price. Timing of any listing is expected, not set.
Fireship does not give a verdict on whether AI collapses. His answer is that some business models are fragile and others are not. He also does not say whether cheap tokens will last, so anyone who needs fixed pricing should not assume they will.
Your next step
List every AI tool or API your WordPress site depends on, such as chat widgets, content helpers and search add-ons. For each one, write down what you pay, who provides the model, and what you would switch to if the price doubled or the service stopped. Then test one alternative on a staging copy of your site this week.
