The article addresses the mechanism in the "How It Breaks" section. The problem lies in the interconnected contracts, not debt financing. If OpenAI cannot get new financing, it will have to cut costs, and one of its big costs are forward compute commitments it will have to break. Those commitments are a significant share of revenue for other companies like CoreWeave and Oracle, so if OpenAI has to cut significantly, it will be crippling to those companies. They in turn have commitments to suppliers like Nvidia, and on down the line the losses propagate, with corresponding drops in equity values in the sector which are extremely growth sensitive. Just as the same dollar showed up in the correlated revenue on the way up, so will the same dollar show up in the correlated losses on the way down. That's the balloon effect here.