Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson · Friday, August 14, 2026
The podcast discusses the increasing demand for capital to fund AI infrastructure, drawing a parallel to the historical "running out of money" issue from 1873. Ben Thompson notes the significant increase in debt raised by large companies for this purpose.
“But where the railroad point is interesting is the fundamental issue that happened in 1873 is the world ran out of money.”
“Which, you know, we've talked about running out of compute. We've talked about running out of power. But the issue at hand here is what happens when you run out of money?”
“And the crazy thing is we sort of blew through debt in like nine months. Like the amount of debt that was raised in the second half of last year and the first half of this year is in the hundreds of millions, probably soon to be approaching like a trillion dollars.”