The stock market turmoil unleashed by the artificial-intelligence industry reflects two fears that are increasingly at odds.
One is that AI is poised to disrupt entire segments of the economy so dramatically that investors are dumping the stocks of any company seen at the slightest risk of being displaced by the technology.
The other is a deep skepticism that the hundreds of billions of dollars that tech giants like Amazon.com Inc., Meta Platforms Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc. are pouring into AI every year will deliver big payoffs anytime soon.
The dueling anxieties have been brewing for months. But they’ve shifted to the center of the stock market over the past two weeks. The result has been a series of punishing selloffs that have hammered dozens of companies across a number of industries — from real estate services and wealth management, to insurance brokers and logistics firms — and wiped more than $1 trillion from the market values of the big tech companies investing the most in AI.
“There is a contradiction when it comes to what investors are worried about when it comes to AI,” Julia Wang, the north Asia chief investment officer at Nomura International Wealth Management, told Bloomberg Television. “Those two things can’t be true at the same time.”
