Investors ‘almost certainly’ in midst of AI bubble: Ken Griffin

Billionaire investor Ken Griffin said Tuesday that investors are dealing with an artificial intelligence bubble , as companies rack up debt to satisfy the demand for data centers and models.

“There’s almost certainly bubbles within this moment in time. And any radical transformation of our economy is generally intertwined with a bubble,” Griffin, the founder of Citadel, told Bloomberg’s Dani Burger at his firm’s Future of Global Markets Conference.

The Citadel CEO noted that corporate America “has been very uneven in its ability to extract value” from AI models.

Debt owed by major tech companies has piled up this year, as the AI build-out marches on. The companies leading the build-out — Amazon, CoreWeave, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle — had issued $193 billion in bonds as of early August, up from $16.7 billion in 2024, according to data from LSEG.

Looking ahead, investment in data centers, networking infrastructure and other equipment necessary for the AI build-out will total $10.3 trillion from last year to 2032, according to projections from the Brookings Institution.

Stocks have slid in recent weeks, as investors raise the caution flag about mounting debt totals. The Nasdaq composite dropped by more than 100 points over the last two weeks, while the S&P 500 has dipped by roughly 90 points during that time period.

“I think all of corporate America is looking at their bills from Anthropic and OpenAI and going, ‘OK, we need to think about how to make sure we’re getting productivity out of this,’” Griffin said Tuesday.

But the hedge fund manager and major GOP donor still has a positive outlook of the future, referencing the railroad boom as an example of a “giant technological” transformation that was “game-changing for the world.”

He added, “And the companies that are on the other side of that bubble are the market leaders for decades to come.”