The Compute Watch: Tracking the Rent on AI Chips
AI chips (GPUs) are bought with borrowed money and paid back with rent. A monthly record of what they rent for, and why that is important.
6 October 2026
Threadbaire
Independent research on AI economics and infrastructure.
AI is attracting enormous investment while changing the economics of the businesses expected to pay for it. Threadbaire investigates where the value is actually being created, who gets to keep it, and who ends up paying for it.
By Lida Liberopoulou · All research CC BY-SA 4.0
The research
The companies building AI are increasingly also financing, supplying, and buying from one another. These relationships make it difficult to distinguish independent demand from activity financed within the same ecosystem, or to see where financial risks ultimately accumulate.
Threadbaire examines how these dependencies formed, what sustains them, and where the costs and risks might land when those relationships come under pressure. The research draws on earlier infrastructure industries and the evolution of the software economy to identify patterns that company-by-company analysis can miss.
Where to start
The foundational argument
The Software Collapse Has Already Happened
Why AI is undermining the economics of the software industry, and why attempts to preserve existing business models may deepen the problem.
The structural and historical framework
The Silicon Industrialists
How AI's industrial costs collide with eroding revenue, how computing once escaped the historical infrastructure pattern, and how the conditions of that escape were gradually reversed.
Part 1: AI's Gilded Age · Part 2: Tech's Great Escape · Part 3: The Return of the Bind
The applied analysis
A Tale of Two Earnings
AI financing relationships read through corporate disclosures, with claims recorded before the earnings and then checked against the filings.
Recent work
The Compute Watch - No. 0: The Baseline
The starting numbers for a monthly record of what AI chips (GPUs) rent for, what lenders charge, and how long owners say the chips last.
6 October 2026
The Silicon Industrialists - Part 3: The Return of the Bind
AI did not create the structure producing its concentration. It inherited it. Part 3 traces how the separations that made the PC, independent software, and the open internet possible were gradually reversed through cloud infrastructure, subscriptions, externalised technical capability, gated distribution, joined identity, and the institutional conditions that allowed those dependencies to accumulate.
4 September 2026
Commissioned research
I take a small number of commissions. Each is an independent, written analysis of a specific AI exposure, thesis or decision: what the evidence shows, what it depends on, and what to watch.
How the research is made
Threadbaire combines economic and historical analysis with direct experimentation using the systems it examines. Working across AI models reveals practical dependencies and limitations that aren't always visible from outside. The research uses an open methodology that keeps context portable and decisions traceable across tools.
The method and templates are freely available.