Admittedly I am not deeply knowledgeable on this. While they are not issuing debt like corporate bond style debt, they are still borrowing this money. I's not coming from current revenue or capital they have amassed, rather it is in the form of agreements with other companies. Reminds me of 'swap' derivatives used by financial institutions, hedge funds, etc.
So for example, NVIDA lends Oracle $100 billion in GPUs, then Oracle lends OpenAI $100 billion in data center space, then OpenAI lends NVIDA $100 billion in compute. Pretty well balanced unless/until the value of any one of these falls.
-If the market turns to smaller, cheaper chips then the $100 billion of NVIDA drops and upsets the balance.
-If other models turn out to be more popular, cheaper than Chat GPT the value of compute drops and upsets the balance.
-If capacity if data centers starts outstripping demand, the value of Oracle declines and you get the picture.
any of the above scenarios can be rebutted, no question. The issue is that these of these have to stay more or less in balance or things can start to unwind. We've seen it again and again in the financial world (e.g mortgages/CMO's) , and really this current AI investing is just financial deal making clothed in "Tech"