Ares won't lend against AI chips as Wall Street stacks $100B in GPU financing deals
BenBajarin · x · 2026-11-01
Michael Arougheti, CEO of major private-credit firm Ares, says the firm can't confidently underwrite GPU depreciation and obsolescence, so it won't lend against AI chips — preferring to finance data centers and power infrastructure whose collateral survives the cycle.
Meanwhile Wall Street is assembling massive chip-financing packages: roughly $60B tied to Broadcom TPUs leased to Anthropic and reported talks around $40B of Nvidia chips for SpaceX. Ben Bajarin notes price patterns resembling bubbles emerge exactly when uncertainty is high and adoption is fast.
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