AI is Wall Street’s modern gold rush. Here’s how investors are placing their bets.
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Artificial-intelligence evangelists such as Sam Altman want to reshape the world, but they need mountains of money to do it. That is sparking a modern-day gold rush on Wall Street.
Tech and power companies are raising cash every which way: issuing shares, loans and bonds on publicly traded markets and in private deals. Large firms, or hyperscalers, such as Amazon.com and Microsoft could easily spend about $3 trillion by 2030 to build and operate data centers for their businesses, according to BlackRock Investment Institute. The trick for financiers is avoiding the losers in a new industry that can turn treacherous on a dime, as it did last week when Chinese upstart DeepSeek triggered a selloff in AI stocks.
The recent frenzy echoes previous bonanzas such as fiber-optic cable, which boomed in the 1990s, busted in the 2000s and ultimately paid out. Fracking for oil and natural gas went through a similar cycle over the past 15 years. Here’s a look at some of the big financial bets being placed in the new digital economy: Stargate, a joint venture between Altman’s Open AI, Oracle and SoftBank, will start with a data center in Abilene, Texas, but none of the partners ponied up the money to build it.
Blue Owl Capital, an up-and-coming private-fund manager, provided the billion-dollar bankroll. The deal started with a cold email Blue Owl sent to Oracle 18 months ago. Best known for its private-credit funds, Blue Owl had grown quickly through acquisitions, and its global real-estate head, Marc Zahr, had an idea to expand even faster through data centers.
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