LONDON: AI was the hot new investment theme once - a shiny opportunity for money managers of all sizes willing to put their capital to work in a transformative technology.
It still is that, sort of, if you look past the warnings of a robot apocalypse, the destructive “rogue” hacking agents that increasingly look more like a feature than a bug, and the legal risks starting to circle around the AI labs. (“Oops, our agents did it again” is wearing thin as an excuse.) Despite all that, no one can reasonably doubt the once-in-a-generation moneymaking capabilities of the ecosystem, from chips to data centres, and that’s the bit that professional investors are paid to think about.
But the AI trade is no longer new and it is no longer “a” theme. Instead it has morphed into “the” theme - a vast, suffocating blob slathered on top of the global financial system, starving everything else of oxygen, distorting market reactions and leaving every portfolio, everywhere, alarmingly reliant on the fortunes of just one bet.
Stocks, real estate, infrastructure, energy, emerging markets, some vintages of private equity - they’re all, to a large extent, the same trade.