The AI spending boom has grown large enough that the Federal Reserve can no longer ignore it, and the furious pace of investment is now firmly on the radar of several central-bank officials.
What they cannot agree on is how alarmed to be, because their public comments range from relaxed to distinctly uneasy, a spread that captures just how hard the boom is to read.
At the calm end sits New York Fed President John Williams, who said he does not see this as a bubble and that he is not especially worried about financial stability from leverage right now.
His reasoning rests on who is borrowing, since much of the spending is being done by highly profitable companies that can absorb the debt far more comfortably than weaker borrowers could.
Others are far less sanguine. San Francisco Fed chief Mary Daly called the sheer growth rate and scale of the investment potentially very worrisome, a notably sharper choice of words, and she flagged a credibility gap too: many of the eye-catching AI commitments remain announcements rather than completed projects, which makes the real level of spending hard to gauge.
