Silence is sometimes more telling than the hubbub of processors. In the Wall Street offices, a little music begins to play, very far from being soothing. As artificial intelligence (AI) eats into more and more aspects of our lives, some finance veterans who have lived through recent big crashes are starting to look at the horizon with concern.
Lloyd Blankfein is one of these alumni. The man who led Goldman Sachs during the 2008 subprime crisis is not the type to panic over nothing. However, his recent comments reported by the media Futurism send shivers down the spine. For him, we are not simply facing a technological innovation, but perhaps facing a financial chasm that we ourselves have dug. “I don’t feel the storm yet, but the horses are starting to neigh in the enclosure», he warns with a poetry that poorly hides a brutal warning.
The figure is enough to make you dizzy: 650 billion dollars. This is the astronomical sum that the tech giants plan to inject into artificial intelligence in 2026. Gigantic data centers are emerging from the ground like mushrooms, hungry for energy and electronic chips, draining the resources of our planet. But there is a problem: for the moment, these massive investments are far from being profitable. We are building incredible digital highways, while still looking for who will be able to pay for them in the long term.
This disconnect between spending and real income is extremely reminiscent of the internet bubble of the 2000s. At the time, all you had to do was add “.com” to your name to see its value soar. Today, the suffix “AI” produces the same magical effect. But as the Futurism article points out, more than a third of fund managers now believe that companies are overinvesting in physical infrastructure with no guarantee of return. The risk? Let everything collapse at once.
The moment of truth approaches for the bubble of the century
Lloyd Blankfein points to an even more vicious danger, “hidden leverage.” It was this invisible mechanism that transformed a local housing crisis into a global collapse in 2008.Everyone said the world wasn’t in debt, until you suddenly discovered there was a huge amount of risk with mortgages in Iceland», he recalls. Clearly, we do not yet know where the toxic debts linked to AI lie, but they are there, lurking in the shadows of the balance sheets of large companies and overvalued startups.
If the bubble bursts, it’s not just Silicon Valley billionaires who will suffer. Lloyd Blankfein is concerned about AI companies opening up to public investment at the most precarious time. “When you lose money to individual consumers, meaning taxpayers and citizens, people in government become very, very angry.“, he explains. The social risk is immense if popular savings are swallowed up in this technological bet.
Some experts are already comparing the current American economy to a single big bet on artificial intelligence. If this technology fails to transform productivity as quickly as expected, assets currently valued at crazy prices will simply no longer find buyers on the market. In the end, AI will likely remain a major technology, just as the internet remained after the year 2000. But the path to getting there is likely to be littered with financial ups and downs. Lloyd Blankfein believes that we are reaching the end of a cycle: the technology may be artificial, but the pain of a crash will be very real for millions of people.
