Yesterday's Alarmism is Tomorrow's Consensus

A couple of years ago, skepticism about the AI boom was something of a fringe position. Today... not so much.From FT Alphaville [love that last line]: Over at Jefferies, head of equity strategy Chris Wood has for some time been offering clients a sum of all fears in one simple, easily ignorable package. His latest outlines his expectation of “massive capital destruction”, as token parsimony replaces tokenmaxxing, and as Chinese open-source models divert spending away from the US majors. It also covers default risk on hyperscaler debt, a lot of which is sitting off-balance-sheet via data centre lease commitments, and the artificial earnings boom from non-cash unrealised gains in investments, compute sales being recognised upfront, and depreciation costs being kept unrealistically low. On top of all that, Wood cites a viral blog from earlier this month about how commitments from hyperscaler tenants like OpenAI should be viewed as liabilities because all they’ll ever do is refinance, not…