The most pressing bottleneck in current AI: cheap money is drying up

Author: Gao Zhimo, Wall Street Insights In the past few years, AI companies have easily raised hundreds of billions of dollars. Wall Street has competed to invest and rarely interfered, focusing on the principle of "more money and less work". Nowadays, lenders and investors are becoming picky and their terms are becoming more demanding. This week, two of the most popular leading players in the AI ​​industry have hit a brick wall in the capital market: Blackstone told investors that Anthropic may only receive a junk rating after listing; OpenAI cut its new round of financing target from US$30 billion to approximately US$20 billion. Two things point to the same change: for the U.S. AI industry, cheap capital is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. Dan Ivascyn, chief investment officer of Pacific Investment Management Company (Pimco), said: "The bar for proving to lenders that these investments can be converted into sufficient income is getting higher and higher...The weak links will be the first to be hit." The money is still there, but it is already a buyer's market