Artificial intelligence is changing what companies spend on, what investors will pay for growth and how governments regulate technology. Our researchers follow the money, the models and the policy.
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Steam, electricity and computers each took decades to show up in productivity statistics. History suggests AI could pay off faster, but history also tells us that gains depend on how quickly firms reorganise.
9 min read
Anthropic is preparing to go public, but is the market ready for its extraordinary cash flows, speculative financing and mountain of infrastructure commitments built in pursuit of ever more powerful AI? The US economy is now hoping Anthropic can eventually turn that promise into certainty, and the question is: how long will Wall Street wait?
Fears over AI’s potential existential threat have entered the economic mainstream. As the US competes with China to lead the technology’s development, the prospect of slowing its advance looks increasingly remote.
In 2013 there were 39 unicorns. Today there are over 1,300. But how many of them justify their immense valuations?
As governments and technology companies compete for increasingly expensive capital, rising bond yields are reshaping the cost of borrowing. Does the growing demand for debt means for governments, financial markets and the future of the AI boom.
Some would describe the so-called "neoclouds" as the railways of the AI revolution that facilitate the steam-trains of the next most powerful chips to thunder across. However, are these AI infrastructure giants economically viable in the long term?
Anthropic's Claude has identified a previously uncharacterised biological system. For biotech investors, the real breakthrough could be AI making the earliest stage of drug discovery much cheaper.
Rising government borrowing and an AI-driven corporate debt boom are testing how global capital is allocated across an increasingly crowded bond market.
Unprecedented AI infrastructure demand has created a memory-chip squeeze. The same semiconductor materials powering your Claude Pro subscription are also needed to build the device you use to access it. The AI giants are hesitant to take their foot off the CapEx gas pedal but what implications has this had for the cost of your new iPhone?
The AI equity surge is spilling into the bond market, keeping US Treasury yields higher than what many think can be sustained. The AI Hyperscalers are expected to spend $700 billion this year. With no sign of slowing capital expenditures, how much more can the bond market take?
China’s leading AI models are approaching US performance despite a vast gap in measured private investment. The divergence suggests that financing structures, computing constraints and diminishing returns matter as much as headline spending.
An allegory on leverage, from the mind of Leopold Aschenbrenner
A divided Fed, a still-roaring AI rally and an Iran framework that collapsed within a fortnight pulled markets in three directions across August. The whiplash between them is a live lesson in how risk gets priced.
The White House and major AI companies meet to finalize the Voluntary AI Framework. With all discussions happening behind closed doors, Americans are left in the dark about the future of artificial intelligence and their government.
Offshore law firms have already sold stakes to private equity. US Big Law is watching, waiting for someone else to go first. The legal industry's long immunity to outside capital is ending, but the terms remain deeply uncertain.
Semiconductor stocks have recently fallen despite resilient commercial demand, raising questions about whether the selloff is a temporary correction or an early warning of a broader economic slowdown.
Big tech is on track to spend up to $690 billion on AI infrastructure this year alone. History suggests the technology can still win even as many of today's financiers lose everything.
AI data centres promise growth, but infrastructure constraints are creating political and economic resistance.
Silicon Valley wants to escape the power grids, water shortages and zoning laws throttling its data centres by launching them into orbit. But Low Earth Orbit is no frictionless void, and moving servers to space may just trade one crisis for another.
AI capital expenditure has emerged as the last major engine of global demand, propping up growth even as trade wars fragment the world economy. Whether that engine can keep pace with its scale and financing is the open question.
Machine learning can spot economic shifts weeks before official statistics catch up, but its black-box reasoning means the most reliable forecasts still come from economists working alongside AI, not being replaced by it.