The week of the largest IPO in history may seem like an odd time to wonder if we need more, rather than less, investment into the US and global economies. Many investors believe the SpaceX IPO (target valuation: $1.78tn) could signal a top to the technology-driven market bubble of the past several years.Markets will always blow off steam at some point. But if we also consider that we are at a moment at which not only AI, but other sectors like energy, defence and manufacturing are growing in many parts of the world and require greater capital infusions, we should ask — are we at the beginning, rather than the end, of a new investment super-cycle?
To pose this question you don’t have to definitively answer things that can’t be known yet — such as whether China or the US will win the AI war, or how the Iran conflict will end, or even what the post-Washington Consensus world will look like, not to mention the many short-term issues around interest rates or inflation or the latest jobs numbers.
You simply have to believe that AI will be a transformative technology (the timeline doesn’t matter so much), that it will require more energy to scale (as all the experts say it will), that a clean-energy revolution is upon us, driven by China, and that nearly every industry will have to spend on upgrades to processes, infrastructure and human capital in order to metabolise these changes.