I watched telecom's ugliest chapter: vendor financing — Lucent lent ~$8.1B, Nortel ~$3.1B, Cisco ~$2.4B, loans booked as revenue, manufacturing demand until fraud and defaults surfaced together. The AI rhyme: NVIDIA's CoreWeave stake, ~$6.3B backstop, xAI investment, and a reported OpenAI ceiling resized from 'up to $100B' to ~$30B non-binding. But the kill-mechanism differs so far: NVIDIA carries these as investments, not revenue. The test is disclosure quality — legitimate finance, circular optics, and fraud are three different things, and the filings decide which, every quarter.