Hashrate Subprime Crisis Alert! AI Infrastructure Debt Surge + Miner Leverage Double Threat, 2026 Credit Collapse Concerns Unveiled

2025 is a prosperous year for tech news: AI investment soars, North American data centers accelerate, and crypto miners transform into computing service providers. But Wall Street’s credit departments are feeling the chill—they’ve discovered they’re financing “fresh” GPUs with a 10-year real estate model, with a maturity of only 18 months! Reuters reports reveal a glimpse of the iceberg: AI infrastructure debt is becoming dense, with total financing surging 112% to $25 billion in 2025. The deep crisis lies in financial mismatches: high-depreciation computing power + volatile miner collateral, bundled with rigid debt, forming a hidden default chain. Asset-side Moore’s Law deflation, financing-side VC packaging infrastructure, miners pretending to transform while truly leveraging, and a liquidity vacuum in liquidations—this is not just an AI bubble, but a failure of credit pricing!

The Deep Truth Behind the AI Infrastructure Debt Surge

Asset-side deflation crisis: Moore’s Law’s brutal revenge

The core of debt issuance is the cash flow coverage ratio (DSCR). Over the past 18 months, the market assumed AI compute rent would remain stable like rent, even inflation-proof. But SemiAnalysis/Epoch AI Q4 2025 data shatters this illusion: unit AI inference costs have decreased 20–40% year-over-year. The table below summarizes key issues:

This means GPUs financed by debt will see rent curves collapse after 2025—equity investments call it progress, debt calls it disaster.

Financing side alienation: VC risk disguises infrastructure returns

Asset returns thin out, liabilities should be more conservative. But reality is the opposite: according to Economic Times/Reuters, AI data center debt financing surged 112% to $25 billion in 2025. Neo-Cloud providers like CoreWeave/Crusoe and miners use ABL/project financing. Structural changes pose risks:

• Past: AI was a VC game, failed equity wiped out
• Present: Packaged as infrastructure, failed debt defaults

High-risk tech assets misallocated into low-risk financing models (Utility-grade Leverage)—VCs packaging infrastructure, hiding default bombs.

Miners’ “Fake Transformation” and “Real Leverage”

The most vulnerable link is crypto miners. Media praise AI “de-risking” transformation, but balance sheets show risk stacking up. VanEck/TheMinerMag data: top miners’ net debt ratio in 2025 remains unhedged, some soaring 500%. Operational paths:

• Asset side: Holding volatile BTC/ETH, or future compute income as implicit collateral
• Liability side: Issuing convertible/high-yield bonds, borrowing USD to buy H100/H200
• Essence: Not deleveraging, but debt rollover

Double leverage game: crypto volatility guarantees GPU cash flow. Favorable winds double profits, headwinds—“coin price drops + rent declines”—kill both simultaneously—“correlation convergence” in credit models, nightmare for structured products.

The Non-Existent “Buyback Market”: Liquidation Liquidity Vacuum

Liquidation after default is even scarier. Real estate crisis can auction properties, but AI compute? Who can buy back ten thousand H100s? Secondary market liquidity overestimated:

• Physical dependency: Requires specialized liquid-cooled racks + high power density (30–50kW/rack)
• Technological obsolescence: NVIDIA Blackwell/Rubin release, old cards non-linearly discounted
• Buyer vacuum: Systematic sell-offs with no “last lender” to take over “electronic waste”

Collateral illusion: Book LTV appears safe, but the reality of billions of sell pressure in the repo market does not exist.

This is not just an AI bubble, but a failure of credit pricing

Clarification: not denying AI prospects or compute demand, but questioning financial structural mismatches. Moore’s Law deflation of GPUs is being used as an anti-inflation real estate pricing model; unleveraged miners disguise quality infrastructure—markets are conducting underpriced credit experiments. History shows: credit cycles peak before tech cycles. Before 2026, macro strategists and credit traders’ top priority is to scrutinize the “AI Infra + Crypto Miners” credit spreads.

Take one step at a time—crises quietly brew from financial mismatches. Vigilance in advance can help avoid a subprime-style collapse!