The Teaser Period: Why the AI Boom Is Hitting a Reset Wall

The article compares the 2006-2008 mortgage “reset wall,” where roughly $1 trillion of adjustable-rate loans were slated to jump 30-50% after two years, to today’s AI compute contracts that defer payments until hardware is delivered, creating a similar multi-year “teaser” period. Over $2.3 trillion of such contracts sit on the books of the four largest U.S. cloud providers, with payments postponed for 24-36 months, exposing the AI boom to a looming, contractual payment shock.