In any normal tech boom, the flood of new equity that AI companies are about to unleash on the stock market might look like a sign of a market top. When companies, almost in unison, become avid sellers of their own shares, watch out below. That was the clear lesson from the torrent of IPOs at the peak of the dotcom bubble.
The AI boom, however, is shaping up differently. At the turn of the century, the number of people online was far too small to justify the huge investments in telecoms networks and internet services. Now, by contrast, even the richest companies are struggling to finance the new data centres needed to meet surging demand for extra AI capacity.
The huge sums that Wall Street is about to be asked for look like being only a down payment on the much larger amounts that the AI industry will need to raise over the next few years. The $765bn likely to be spent on AI data centres this year will be only a tenth of the total needed by 2031, according to Goldman Sachs.