Kerman Kohli: The bottleneck of computing power financing lies in credit

Cryptocurrency researcher Kerman Kohli published "Compute Financing" on Substack on October 19, 2026, discussing financing for computing power construction. He believes one of the main bottlenecks is capital, especially credit: early expenditures mainly come from balance sheet cash, followed by a shift to equity financing. The article cites Alphabet's $85 billion financing and Meta's fundraising through shareholder dilution, with the next step being the credit market.

Kohli summarizes the current beliefs of creditors into three points, which he believes are incompatible: AI may be a bubble; the biggest risk is counterparty risk in purchase contracts; the underlying GPUs are not valuable and depreciate like ordinary hardware. He argues that demand is closer to infinite, stating that the demand for agentic AI is growing by about 2.5 to 5 times each year, with supply potentially doubling by the end of 2030. Memory is expected to sell out by 2027, with computing power commitments reaching trillions of dollars, and he mentions Jane Street's multi-billion dollar commitments, as well as the needs of pharmaceutical companies, research, military, and cybersecurity.

Regarding efficiency, he states that when the cost of intelligence drops by 90%, the increase in usage is even greater, with a baseline exceeding 10 times, and he cites Jevons' Paradox.

On the topic of purchasing, Kohli believes that computing power is more substitutable than real estate; when demand is strong, if someone withdraws their commitment, others will take over. He mentions that many creditors require 2 to 3 year contracts and down payments of 20% to 30%, sometimes as high as 50%, and locking in long-term discount contracts effectively shorts computing power for lenders. The article also states that computing power rental prices have risen by about 50% in the past 6 months and about 100% in the past year, with B300 supplies being tight. Regarding collateral, he notes that the A100 from 2020 is still operational and rented out until 2029, leading him to believe it has at least about 9 years of use value; the current price of B200 is about 50% higher than when it was released about two years ago, and a 6-year-old A100 is still worth about 25% of its value. He concludes that computing power will surpass real estate to become the largest asset class, and the scale of credit-supported computing power is currently just beginning.