An AI bubble? Not so, says this leading money manager

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The world’s largest asset manager dismissed worries of an AI bubble and instead said that the industry is providing unrivaled opportunities to investors, in remarks Tuesday at the Milken Institute Global Conference.Larry Fink, chairman and chief executive of BlackRock, said that despite concerns that AI is being hyped, there is legitimate need for trillions in investment for energy, chips and hardware.“We have supply shortages.Demand is growing much faster than anyone has ever anticipated, and this is just a U.S.

phenomenon.We have not begun the whole concept of exploring the opportunities of AI around the world,” Fink said during a panel discussion at the annual Beverly Hills conference hosted by financier Michael Milken’s think tank.

Business Jeff Bezos is trying to leapfrog into the artificial intelligence race with a $100-billion fund to acquire manufacturers and bring more AI superpowers to factory floors.Fink said that his New York company, with more than $14 trillion under management, has deep investments in hyperscalers — companies such as Google and Amazon that operate massive data centers — that will pay off.“It’s a great return for a pension fund, for a 401(k), for a sovereign wealth fund, for an insurance company.

Much of it is going to be financed by debt, and that’s going to be a big role of private credit in financing of this build-out of America,” he said.Fink was joined on the panel by Bruce Flatt, chief executive of Brookfield Corp., an alternative asset manager based in Toronto that host Michael Milken described as the world’s largest clean energy investor.Flatt compared AI to other historic economic disruptions.“We will be rewiring the global economy to lay the networks that we laid before, which were highways, utilities, railways.And now we’re laying cloud, artificial intelligence, factories and data centers — that’s what’s...