ExclusiveUS AI investment to deliver returns despite open-source Chinese rivals: Goldman Sachs
A wave of demand for agentic AI will prove to be a pivotal ‘inflection point’ and vindicate high capital expenditure, Eric Sheridan says
Instead of an AI bubble, US tech leaders are standing at a pivotal “inflection point” where the arrival of economically productive agentic AI tools has provided early vindication of the industry’s unprecedented capital expenditure on core infrastructure such as data centres and semiconductors, Sheridan said on the sidelines of Goldman Sachs’ Asia Communacopia + Technology Conference in Hong Kong on Monday.
“There’s a pretty big disconnect between the demand and the availability of compute,” Sheridan told the South China Morning Post. “We don’t think that imbalance closes until well into the second half of 2027.”
His remarks come amid recurring questions about whether the historic levels of AI infrastructure spending in the US – on track to top US$700 billion this year – will be able to deliver proportional investment returns.
Such scepticism has only been amplified as Chinese companies have open-sourced cheaper AI models, prompting some analysts to predict an erosion of margins for US model providers.