Two of Wall Street’s biggest firms say the AI boom is far from a speculative mania.
Instead, BlackRock and Bank of America say this cycle is being driven by real corporate investments, profits and productivity gains, not the kind of irrational exuberance that defined the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s.
“We don’t think the bubble framework is that helpful at this stage for investors,” Jean Boivin, director of the BlackRock Investment Institute, said in a media roundtable on Tuesday.
“We want to avoid just putting everything into some kind of retrospective metric or evaluation,” he continued, noting that it is “incomplete” to describe the AI boom as a bubble given that construction continues to develop at an “unprecedented” scale and pace.
Boivin also highlighted the healthy level of skepticism that currently exists in the markets.
“There’s a lot of talk about the potential of the bubble… people are aware of the risk,” he said. “When there’s no discussion about that, that’s when we should be most concerned.”
BlackRock argues that the AI spending boom is so big that it has become the macro story itself, saying the scale of corporate investment could push US GDP growth consistently above the 2% trend that has dominated for decades.
“Capital spending ambitions tied to AI development are so large that micro is macro,” the firm wrote in its outlook, estimating corporate spending plans between $5 trillion and $8 trillion globally through 2030, most of it in the United States.
“The challenge for investors: reconciling huge capital spending plans with the potential revenue from AI,” BlackRock added. “Will their orders of magnitude match?”
The firm also pointed out the physical limits of construction, from computing to networking, noting that AI data centers could consume 15% to 20% of US electricity by the end of the decade. That makes construction both transformative and vulnerable: “This front-loading of spending is necessary to achieve eventual gains,” BlackRock wrote.
BlackRock said those pressures are part of a structural shift, arguing that AI is helping to drive stocks to record levels and that it “remains risk-friendly and sees the AI theme as remaining the primary driver for U.S. stocks.”
Bank of America took a similar tone, but with a more explicit warning about how the next phase of the boom might unfold.
“Are we in the year 2000? Are we in a bubble? No,” Savita Subramanian, head of U.S. equity and quantitative strategy, said during BofA’s outlook conference call on Tuesday. “Will AI continue to lead without restrictions? Neither.”
Subramanian sees the current environment as more of a pause than the beginning of a collapse, describing a potential “air pocket” where capital spending outpaces revenue growth. That gap between investment and monetization, especially around energy and infrastructure bottlenecks, could spook investors in the short term.