Cheaper stocks. Better earnings.
That’s not usually what the end of a bull market looks like.
Valuations are coming down because earnings are catching up with prices, and companies are crushing numbers while estimates for next year may still be too low.
And yet the conversation around AI is getting increasingly bearish.
AI needs to slow down.
The spending is getting out of control.
The trade is too crowded.
Maybe.
But when I look at what companies are actually doing, I see something very different.
I don’t buy the slowdown story. Not for a second.
Here’s why.
Words Are Cheap. Actions Aren’t.
On September 12, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, the company behind Claude, published an essay warning about AI risk and urging the industry to slow down. The reaction was instant. AI was supposedly in trouble. The trade was done. Time to rotate out.
Two days later, Barron’s put this on the cover.
A magazine hedging both directions on the same cover tells me the debate has become the story. I’ve learned to treat that as noise, not as a forecast.
A week later, to the day, the Nasdaq set a new all-time high.
Meanwhile, Meta shipped Muse. Zuckerberg’s stance hasn’t wavered. His answer to risk from new technology is to build faster and safer, not to stop building. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang apologized this week too, not for moving too fast on AI, but for not looping in local communities on data center buildout soon enough. Read that again. The apology was about communication, not about slowing down.
Here’s the part that gets buried under all the safety talk. If OpenAI and Anthropic actually pump the brakes, the gap between them and everyone else narrows. Meta speeds up. The open source labs speed up. China has no obvious incentive to slow down. So even the labs that talk publicly about caution have every incentive, economic and competitive, to keep their foot on the gas. Slowing down isn’t a free option. It’s a way to lose ground you don’t get back.
Watch the Money, Not the Headlines
I wrote this in my Saturday update and it’s worth repeating here. Money talks. Data centers are shouting.
Private construction spending tells the whole story in one chart. Almost every other category is rolling over. Data centers are the one line still going up and to the right.
Data centers now eat up nearly 7% of total US power demand. A decade ago that number barely moved. Now it’s a hockey stick, and it’s still bending upward.
That is not what a slowdown looks like. You don’t commit this kind of capital to a technology you expect to pull back on.