[razoorka]

It is. What you're describing is what used to be called financial velocity without value creation.

We're watching a cycle where companies raise, reinvest, and report "growth" that's mostly internal money circulation — cloud credits, infra leases, or pre-paid AI capacity deals that move cash between subsidiaries or friendly vendors. None of it produces new productivity; it just inflates asset books.

Big Tech's current AI spending is a perfect example. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta will spend around $364 billion on infrastructure this year — roughly double their historical capex ratios. Yet revenue growth in their core businesses is slowing. They're scaling faster than they can monetize, essentially subsidizing the appearance of progress.

The real red flag is cultural: when companies optimize for spend instead of outcomes, engineering starts following the same pattern — more abstraction, more compute, less efficiency. Eventually, both finance and technology hit physical limits.

If you're interested, I broke down the numbers and engineering side of this dynamic here: https://techtrenches.substack.com/p/big-techs-364-billion-be...