Amol Sharma

Hi, this is Amol Sharma, the journal's financial editor.

For 2026, one thing we'll be super focused on is the financing of the AI arms race and the worries that a bubble is forming right now in AI.

And we've been documenting the enormous sums of money that have been flowing from Wall Street

into all these data centers that are being built out for the open AIs of the world.

So if real problems start to emerge, there could be all kinds of triggers that send us down the wrong path in AI.

You could see companies delaying projects or

pulling back even slightly on spending commitments.

Things like that would definitely spook the markets.

Lenders could, of course, demand higher returns, driving up the cost of capital for AI companies.

All these things would be really damaging for sort of the momentum of the AI build-out.

But it's also possible that the jitters that we've been seeing in the markets lately about AI are just that, just passing jitters.

So we'll have to see how it plays out.