The article didn't really give much background, but I think this is important for understanding the current bubble so here's my (non-economist) attempt at explaining:
Let's say you run a print business. Customers bring you stuff and you make copies. In order to run your business, you need to buy a fancy copy/printer machine. Let's say that costs $10,000. Your first year in business, let's say you make $2,000 in revenue. Since you bought the printer, your total profit is... -$8000. Not great if you're trying to attract potential investors. But! There's a neat accounting trick you can do called depreciation. See, you expect your expensive printer will be in service for 10 years so instead of putting a 10k expense on your books on year one, you spread out the cost over 10 years (1k every year). Just by changing your accounting strategy, you've gone from losing 8k your first year to making a profit of 1k. Much more attractive for potential investors.
Now imagine that instead of a print business you're an AI company, and instead of a 10k printer, you need to buy thousands of specialty GPUs that cost $50,000 a pop. Obviously you'll wanna spread those massive costs out over the service life of the GPUs, but how long is that? Most experts and most evidence will tell you that these things will probably be good for 2-3 years before needing to be replaced, so your depreciated cost should be somewhere between 15 and 25k per GPU. But fuck the experts and the evidence — you're Oracle, and according to you, the expected service life is 6 years. Now those GPUs are only costing you ~8k per year, and your books look much better to investors.
What's crazy is that you can look at the books of these publicly-traded tech giants and see that they've been lowering the depreciation cost of their GPU assets (by extending their expected service life) year after year. Nothing about that hardware has changed and those companies are using that same hardware for more and more compute each year... but somehow they're going to last longer than expected? They're lying about their hardware expenses to make their revenue shortfalls seem smaller. And the situation gets even crazier when you consider that all of those rapidly-depreciating GPUs are being used as collateral as these companies take on massive debt to buy even more GPUs — GPUs that will be worthless long before those loans are expected to be paid back. If OpenAI goes bust, not even the bank is getting paid because all their "collateral" won't even be worth the silicon it's printed on.
It's like one house of cards built on top of another, even shittier house of cards... and then the entire US economy is balanced on top of that. WTF.