Bloomberg：AI资本循环吸引外资流入美股，类似2008年资金墙

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You're listening to Bloomberg [music] Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenc on Bloomberg Radio.

The other thing [music] that we watch so closely is what's going on in the world of AI.

Yeah. Earlier today, we spoke with Gotham Makunda, Bloomberg opinion columnist who wrote about the AI industry who is not ready for this coming crisis. So, if you missed that interview, check it out on our podcast feed. Now, we're following the money. We teased this one with the headline a little earlier today about how AI's giant money loop is drawing foreign cash like 2008. You said, Carol, the year 2008 is one that gets people's attention.

It does.

Sean Donan, it's today's big take. It is one of the most read stories on the Bloomberg terminal. Shawn Donan is a senior writer for economics for Bloomberg News. Uh Shawn joins us this afternoon. Sean, um, first I just want to start with following the money, uh, this special report by by Bloomberg Economics, understanding state craft and the role with the investment that's happening from around the world. What did you and the team find?

Yeah, look, so we were really starting to look at how AI is affecting the flow of capital around the world. And I think what we discovered was that in the world of AI, we think of circular financing relationships between the companies that are involved here in the United States. Uh and we discovered and and and dove into uh this other circular relationship which is between uh essentially the companies uh sorry the countries and economies uh where a lot of the chips and other products that are and other inputs that are going into data centers as part of the big AI buildout are coming from uh and uh US markets and really what we found is that uh we have seen this huge buildup in savings as a result of the US appetite for these chips and these huge new pools of capital uh that have that have grown up very very quickly in places like South Korea and Taiwan.

Um and those pools of capital have started to flow back into US markets, particularly US equities, uh and AI stocks. And that for those of us who are old enough and remember the early 2000s and the 2008 crisis is really reminiscent of the kind of wall of money that we saw in the early 2000s that at the time was coming into US treasuries uh and helping to drive uh what eventually became you know the housing boom and then uh the subprime crisis.

So what's you know what's interesting is you take us to um Virginia and talk about the data center build and what's interesting is you know we do wonder whether this build is you know there's a promise of profits and returns on investments and so on and so forth. Time will tell as you know Shannon uh Sean whether or not this all kind of pans out but you do take us to Virginia and what's going on there. Yeah. So, I mean, Lowden County, Virginia, which is right outside of Washington DC, it's about a 40-minute drive from where I'm sitting now, uh is uh really the kind of epicenter of data center land in uh in in the United States, if you will.

And what's really interesting about Lowden County, it's a place that started to bet heavily on data centers in 2008, uh, as a result of the collapse in property tax revenues that they saw as a result of the subprime crisis at at the time. And they said, "Hey, we need another revenue sources." And they latched on to data centers. And we've seen and that at that time it was a huge buildout associated with the cloud computing that that we've seen but that has only accelerated as a result of all the demand for compute as we call it uh from from AI.

And so you have this this line that's been drawn uh from that 2008 crisis to this county that has reinvented itself around data centers and now draws 40% of the tax revenues in Lowden County about$1.2 billion dollars this fiscal year. uh come just from data centers and they're starting to say well hang on a second here maybe if there is another crisis that comes and AI is a bubble and that bubble bursts we're going to be heavily exposed and maybe we need to start looking for other potential sources of revenues and to diversify the economy so you know and and a lot of that money that is flowing into those data center projects in places like Loud and Cunny county is actually foreign capital and it's that money that's coming from u out of those big pools of capital that are um building up overseas.

It's again this kind of wall of money that's coming into the US and feeding a big asset bubble.

It's not just Silicon Valley that could be impacted by an AI bust. It's a much more global thing. I remember being in India during the great financial crisis in [music] December and everybody's like none of this is going to touch the emerging markets. They're immune. don't worry about [music] it and we know it impacted the entire world. Um Sean, thank you so much. Thanks for for joining Tim and me. Sean Don, [music] the senior writer for economics at Bloomberg News, joining us from the Bloomberg News, Washington DC here.