There is a lot to unpack here, finance is interesting.

Investors spend money to build companies on the expectation that those companies will be worth more money than they spent in the future.

One way they spend that money is on the acquisition of bonds, which are firm guarantees against future debts. Bonds are often part of other financial structures (you'll see them a lot in a hedge, which is a way to limit liability on an investment in exchange for some upside).

If I'm reading the article correctly, those bonds had a condition where they could be converted to shares at a certain price, so the investment and the hedge were part of the same instrument.

It's not accurate to say that the money could have been deployed otherwise, one way to think about this is that large banks have very large, often self-issued, credit limits. Companies also have self-issued credit limits, related to the banks.

In this case specifically, some amount of this money is going to come out of the IPO, the 80 billion doesn't exist in any other way.

tl;dr The 80 billion that 'vanished' here wasn't actually spent on anything, it's valuation against those bonds. It's also an exciting headline.

Anyways, I hope this was helpful, these companies are definitely getting a lot of investment (running up their credit cards) in the hopes of a big payout, but this doesn't have anything to do with private equities current running speculation on data center construction or power consumption, or any of those big problems.

From what I understood it’s not really money “lost”, it’s that the company was valued a certain amount and, with a bit of that hype dying down, it’s now valued 80 Billion less.

I’m not an expert on… pretty much any argument in this thread though, so if someone more knowledgeable can chime in I’d appreciate too.