Stronger Balance Sheets Support the AI CapEx Cycle

Our Head of Corporate Credit Research Andrew Sheets wades into the debate around whether the boom in artificial intelligence investment is a warning sign for credit markets. 

Read more insights from Morgan Stanley.

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Andrew Sheets: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Andrew Sheets, Head of Corporate Credit Research at Morgan Stanley.

Today – the debate about whether elevated capital expenditure and AI technology is showing classic warning signs of overbuilding and worries for credit.

It's Thursday, October 23rd at 2pm in London.

Two things are true. AI related investment will be one of the largest investment cycles of this generation. And there is a long history of major investment cycles causing major headaches to the credit market. From the railroads to electrification, to the internet to shale oil, there are a number of instances where heavy investment created credit weakness, even when the underlying technology was highly successful.

So, let's dig into this and why we think this AI CapEx cycle actually has much further to run.

First, Morgan Stanley has done a lot of good collaborative in-depth work on where the AI related spend is coming from and what's still in the pipeline. And importantly, most of the spending that we expect is still well ahead of us. It's only really ramping up starting now.

Next, we think that AI is seen as the most important technology of the next decade by some of the biggest, most profitable companies on the planet. We think this increases their willingness to invest and stick with those investments, even if there's a lot of uncertainty around what the return on all of this expenditure will ultimately be.

Third, unlike some other major recent capital expenditure cycles – be they the internet of the late 1990s or shale oil of the mid 2010s, both of which were challenging for credit – much of the spending that we're seeing today on AI is backed by companies with extremely strong balance sheets and significant additional debt capacity. That just wasn't the case with some of those other prior investment cycles and should help this one run for longer.

And finally, if we think about really what went wrong with some of these prior capital expenditure cycles, it's often really about overcapacity. A new technology – be it the railroads or electricity or the internet – comes along and it is transformational.

And because it's transformational, you build a lot of it. And then sometimes you build too much; you build ahead of the underlying demand. And that can lower returns on that investment and cause losses.

We can understand why large levels of AI capital investment and the history of large investment cycles in the past causes understandable concern. But when tying these dynamics together, it's important to remember why large investment cycles have a checkered history. It's usually not about the technology not working per se, but rather a promising technology being built ahead of demand for it and resulting in excess capacity driving down returns in that investment, and the builders lacking the financial resources to bridge that gap.

So far, that's not what we see. Data centers are still seeing strong underlying demand and are often backed by companies with exceptionally good resources. We need to watch if either of these change.

But for now, we think the AI CapEx cycle has much further to go.

Thank you as always for your time. If you find Thoughts on the Market useful, let us know by leaving a review wherever you listen. And also tell a friend or colleague about us today