An FT analysis found companies supplying compute, chips and data-center capacity to OpenAI have taken on about $96 billion in debt to finance expansion. The indebtedness—borne by hyperscalers and specialist cloud providers—raises risks for the research ecosystem that universities rely on for cloud compute and large-scale AI experiments. The story flags potential consequences for grant budgets, cloud pricing, and university partnerships if vendor finances tighten, and notes that hyperscalers have also issued large amounts of debt to fund AI build-outs.