Part 4/13:
Current funding models involve companies raising equity, paying for hardware via installment plans (GPU leasing), and forming cooperative arrangements.
Some companies (notably NVIDIA, OpenAI, CoreWeave) borrow heavily or raise large equity rounds to finance their compute infrastructure.
Winton warns of a potential reckoning: "At some point, there's going to be an excess of GPUs owned by the wrong entities or in the wrong places," leading to restructuring or down rounds. Still, he notes that the industry is in an early phase, comparable to 1995 in the internet’s development—just before the explosive growth of the dot-com bubble.