The debate over the artificial-intelligence boom has mostly been framed as a market question: whether NVIDIA Corp.'s valuation is stretched, whether hyperscalers are overbuilding data centers, whether the capital-expenditure cycle can eventually be justified by revenue.

According to Scott Ortkiese, CEO & President of Faulkner Capital Holdings, that’s the wrong question. “The important story is not whether the bubble pops; the important story is who pays when it does,” he wrote for Throughline Synthesis.

His argument is that the risk has already been routed away from venture investors and chip buyers into a machinery of private credit, life-insurance reserves and state guaranty funds.

The apparent equity bubble, in Ortkiese’s telling, is really a credit structure — one that connects NVIDIA’s AI infrastructure ambitions to annuity holders and, eventually, state taxpayers.