The modern world finds itself caught in a massive storm of risk, created by the historical crises of capital and non-transparent financial structures, coinciding with a technological leap. Artificial intelligence and related high-tech investments – seen as the most important tools for bringing about a major transformation of our era and building a new global order – are, in fact, a desperate attempt to escape the historical crisis capitalism is currently experiencing due to its own internal dynamics, effectively adding fuel to the fire it seeks to avoid.

We can examine this process through three interconnected key axes: the tendency for profit rates to fall, the financial debt spiral and the struggle for global hegemony.

THE DECLINE IN PROFITS AND THE NECESSITY FOR TECHNOLOGICAL INVESTMENT

Kansu Yıldırım’s comprehensive analysis, published in the 26 July edition of the Evrensel newspaper, clearly demonstrates that global capitalism has been facing a serious crisis of profitability over the past 50 years; profit rates, which stood at 10.3 per cent in 1966, have fallen to 6.8 per cent by 2020.

Today, the fact that tech giants (Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon) are investing hundreds of billions of dollars in artificial intelligence is, in a fundamental sense, an effort to create relative surplus value and eliminate competitors from the market in order to escape this ‘Long Depression’. However, as Marx predicted, the same technological advances reduce the share of living labour, thereby increasing the organic composition of capital, which in turn drives profit rates down in the long term.

THE ‘OFF-BALANCE-SHEET’ DEBT BUBBLE

This unerring dynamic brings us to the second point: this AI race amongst the tech giants is being built upon a massive financial risk. It is becoming clear that, whilst AI revenues are growing, capital expenditure is rising faster than revenues and is eroding free cash flow.

In addition to the $1.35 trillion in debt reflected on the balance sheets of the five major tech giants, it is claimed that they have accumulated $1.65 trillion in ‘off-balance-sheet’ debt. By financing their data centres and GPU investments through ‘Special Purpose Vehicles’ (SPVs), these companies are not showing these massive liabilities on their official balance sheets.

For example, Meta’s $27 billion Hyperion data centre has been financed using this model, and the debt does not legally appear to belong to Meta.

This situation carries the risk of an “AI bubble” ready to burst, reminiscent of the CDO instruments that triggered the 2008 crisis or the Enron scandal.

DIGITAL COLONIALISM

The long-term downward trend in profit margins and the fact that tech giants are continuing to operate on the back of a massive financial risk are forcing the capitalist system to rapidly implement well-known emergency measures aimed at ‘balancing’ this ‘trend’. Across the world, including in the core countries, the real and relative wages of the working class are falling; a massive army of the unemployed and a ‘surplus’ population are emerging worldwide; but most importantly, as imperialist colonialist policies intensify at the cost of natural and social devastation, regional wars are breaking out one after another.

It is clear that this reality constitutes the economic and political motivation behind the digital colonialist aggression and necro-extractivism I attempted to describe in my previous article.

In short, when all these data points are brought together, the picture that emerges is this: whilst capitalism attempts to compensate for falling profit rates through advances in artificial intelligence, it is, like a monster devouring its own tail, fuelling the very dynamics from which it is fleeing; as a result, it is concealing a debt burden of unprecedented historical magnitude, borne by the giant technology companies, in ‘off-balance-sheet’ areas.

All that remains for the oppressed peoples is plunder, destruction and war.

Note: This article is translated from the original article titled Yapay zekânın borç balonu ve savaş, published in BirGün newspaper on July 31, 2026.