Goldman Sachs Sees Gold Mine in Financing AI

It’s not only tech companies that see artificial intelligence as a big new moneymaking opportunity. It’s a potential gold mine for investment banks, according to Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon. Using a newer piece of corporate lingo, Solomon “double-clicked”—elaborated, in plain English—on the potential of AI while he was speaking on Monday’s earnings call. The need for companies and governments to finance the infrastructure and power necessary for AI technologies offered an opportunity on a “scale that is, candidly, unprecedented” over the next five to 10 years, he said.

Solomon’s comments perhaps should have been obvious, given the increasing signs that big tech companies and entrepreneurs like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are planning to spend humongous amounts of money on AI, particularly around chips and data centers. Just on Monday, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis told a conference that Google was investing more than $100 billion “over time” in AI, Bloomberg reported. His comment was in response to a question about The Information’s report late last month that Microsoft planned to spend $100 billion on one data center for OpenAI. Meanwhile, last week The New York Times quoted Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei saying large language models coming out later this year will cost close to $1 billion to develop.