Bloomberg Surveillance · Tuesday, September 29, 2026
Gary Gensler, former SEC chair and current MIT professor, stated that the current AI investment boom, which accounts for 2.5% of the economy, is about twice the scale of the internet investment boom in the 1990s. He noted that while the 1990s tech investment represented about 1% to 1.5% of the economy, the current AI data center and related investments are significantly larger, presenting a challenge for companies like Anthropic and OpenAI.
“This is now 2.5% of our economy. I'm talking about all the data centers and so forth. And here's the challenge for Anthropic and OpenAI is the Chinese models They might not be quite at the frontier, but if they're two to six months behind us, regardless of how they do it, whether they use what's called distillation or not, and they're spending a lot less in the Chinese economy, a lot of U.S. companies are saying, look, I'll use the Chinese model to do my reasoning, and maybe I won't use open AI or anthropic. So that's the challenge for them. They're spending so much money But will it lead to the revenues to justify that spending?”
“So back to Alan Greenspan, he was watching as a lot of tech companies were investing, and it added up to about 1% to 1.5% of the economy.”