The smartest PE firms are financing the destruction of their own portfolios.

On 4 May, TPG, Brookfield, Advent and Bain backed a $10bn OpenAI deployment vehicle. The same day, Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman seeded a $1.5bn Anthropic joint venture to push Claude into PE-owned companies.

This week Apollo and Blackstone are negotiating $35bn of private credit to fund Broadcom's AI chip build-out.

Meanwhile their software portfolios are being hollowed out.

I've sat in board meetings where the CFO can't explain why ARR is decelerating. The answer is that almost every buyer is drawing the same chart at the same time. Per-seat licences cancelled because a Cursor subscription does the job. Vibe-coded internal tools replacing entire SaaS layers. Anthropic shipping a model that ports legacy COBOL in an afternoon.

PE spent $440bn over a decade on a SaaS thesis that just broke. The same firms now writing cheques to the companies breaking it.

The official line is that the AI exposure hedges the SaaS exposure. It doesn't. A hedge requires the two sides to be roughly equal. You cannot offset a trillion-dollar software book with a $5bn slice of an OpenAI joint venture.

It is just the next trade. Same firms. Same playbook. Different bag holders.

Three years from now someone will write this exact post about the AI infrastructure boom. The firms financing it today will be the ones trying to exit it.

This is how the cycle keeps closing. The firm that lit the fire ends up underwriting the water.