The big AI spenders are now burning more cash than they make, and this is bad news for the stock market and the wider economy.

• The giants — Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle — have flipped from big profits to steeply negative free cash flow because of massive AI spending.
• They've run out of their own cash, so they're borrowing heavily: six of them have issued about $244 billion in bonds this year, with over $10 trillion in spending expected in coming years.
• As they flood the market with debt, buyers demand higher interest rates, which forces even more borrowing or selling new shares that would dilute and drag down stock prices.
• AI is a trap because each better model costs far more to run than the last, so this spending keeps rising instead of falling like normal tech.
• The likely endgame is a government bailout — these firms cozy up to Washington to become "too big to fail" before they actually fail.

Outlook: Expect rising borrowing costs and pressure on tech stocks, with the whole AI-propped economy at risk of a bust bigger than the dot-com crash.