General Discussion

The top 10 stocks in the S&P 500 account for 40% of the index’s market cap. Since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, AI-related stocks have registered 75% of S&P 500 returns, 80% of earnings growth, and 90% of capital spending growth. Meanwhile, AI investments accounted for nearly 92% of the U.S. GDP growth this year. Without those AI investments, Harvard economist Jason Furman noted, growth would be flat. As Ruchir Sharma concluded in the Financial Times, “America is now one big bet on AI,” adding, “AI better deliver for the U.S., or its economy and markets will lose the one leg they are now standing on.” This concentration creates fragility, and how the end begins becomes more visible.
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Dot com vibes
The AI infrastructure build-out has accelerated recently with an estimated $1 trillion in new commitments. Some firms are making deals with money and assets that don’t yet exist. See: OpenAI promising Oracle $300 billion — money it doesn’t have — for infrastructure Oracle hasn’t built. In other cases, revenue comes from “circular financing,” where dollars rotate between firms, obscuring true market demand. See: Nvidia’s $100 billion investment in OpenAI, which OpenAI will use to buy … Nvidia chips. Circular financing deals were common toward the end of the dot-com bubble, when similar deals contributed to a crash that destroyed 77% of Nasdaq market value. If we are on the precipice of a bubble popping, Nvidia and OpenAI will likely be ground zero. But the fallout would be widespread, as an ecosystem that resembles an ouroboros lives and dies by a shared narrative.