Christina Hooper

Yeah, we do conversations for curious minds, no dry discussions here.

Well, I think there is just a lot of enthusiasm around anything that's related to AI.

And I'm old enough to remember the late 1990s and how much enthusiasm there was around any companies that were related to the Internet, for example.

Everyone was scrambling to change their name to have .com at the end.

Now many companies are scrambling to say they are part of this incredible AI food chain.

And I think what is happening, though, is that investors may not be thinking about what could be obstacles to the continued capex boom around AI.

And I think there are some pretty significant ones.

First of all, we knew, and of course we got the deal done on rare earth elements, but that was clearly an issue.

If you don't have access to enough rare earth elements, that will certainly slow down an AI capex boom.

But we also have concerns around how much productivity gains companies will actually see.

We had that MIT report that came out last spring that suggested maybe not so much.

There could be a point where companies say, you know what, we've thrown an enormous amount of money at this.

We're not necessarily seeing all that we wanted to see.

We'll slow down investment.

And then finally, we have the potential for a NIMBY movement, not in my backyard.

In fact, you just reported on how there are AI data centers.

And of course, we're seeing a lot more news around neighborhoods that are not thrilled to have AI there or states that don't want to see it there because electricity costs are going up a lot.

Absolutely.

I think it's both.

There are certainly real question marks, I think, about how much more investment we'll see companies make without seeing sort of significant gains and perhaps recognizing that there could be some overlap.