Brookings just published a brutally honest paper on what the AI buildout is costing America. A Columbia economist added up every data center, chip, power line and cooling system the US plans to build for AI, and the total reads like a warning to anyone with a pension. $10.3 trillion between 2025 and 2032. That's 3.6% of the entire US economy, every year, for eight years. No American infrastructure boom has come close. The railroad boom of the 1800s, the usual benchmark, peaked at about 2.2% of GDP. Canals, electrification, the interstate highways and the internet all came in smaller. The numbers are rough. Big tech's spending on AI infrastructure went from $97 billion in 2020 to about $400 billion in 2025, and it's on track for $800 billion next year. Over $1.3 trillion in debt is already committed to it. A growing share of that money moves through private credit, special-purpose vehicles and off-balance-sheet deals, where outsiders struggle to see who holds the risk. The economist stopped short of calling it a bubble. He said it's too early to compare it to the credit booms that ended in crashes, and he still doubts the payoff. "Silicon Valley wants all of us to believe that this is a miracle technology... it has to generate trillions of dollars of revenues to be financeable. I'm just not sure how likely it is." His main recommendation is to measure the exposure and make it public now, while the money is still moving, before a downturn reveals where it sits. I've been asking the AI labs for the same thing all week. Show us the incidents, show us the debt, show us who's exposed. Whose savings are underneath it when the bill comes due?

The chief economist at Apollo is warning that mass adoption of AI agents could trigger a bank run as they optimize user investments. Gary Gensler spent his last few years as SEC chair warning that the exact same problem will hit the markets: the pursuit of algorithmic perfection at scale destroys system stability. Personal-finance agents making simultaneous optimal decisions could potentially cause a massive flash crash. Agent acausal coordination, with no messages passed between them, will show up in a lot of places. Markets will get the big headlines, but huge numbers of clever advisors making very similar choices will impact all of human society. Capability gains make this worse, not better. The smarter the agents, the narrower the optimal path; and knowing that other agents see that exact same path lets them move together without talking to each other. Agents do not need to collude to act in unison. Thus, they break no human laws by doing so. Human laws were not written for this. They were not written for a lot of what is coming, and it is about to start happening very fast.