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Hello! My colleagues and I are sharpening our questions for Monday’s Financing the AI Revolution summit at the New York Stock Exchange. It will be the perfect New York spring afternoon to pressure-test how investors and executives are adjusting to new realities in the business. More companies are slowing their spending on artificial intelligence tools, and big tech companies aren’t sure how their huge data center investments will pay off. But venture capitalists can’t get enough of the kind of AI “wrapper” apps they seemed to be discarding a year ago. Those long-term calculations are playing out amid recent economic pain, with tech stocks down for the year and a trade war threatening the economy at large. What next? We wanted to structure the kind of event that would actually be more fruitful than a normal afternoon’s meetings and calls. We’ll have over an hour and a half of networking, including a cocktail hour on the NYSE trading floor (after trading ends, of course). The panels will be small, focused, relevant and lively. Some of the world’s largest financial institutions will be onstage—Blackstone, KKR, Fidelity and BlackRock—along with some of the most important tech investors of the moment—General Catalyst, Atreides Management and Benchmark. I will use this newsletter as a cheat sheet of sorts to talk about some potential highlights from the day. (I also should mention that tickets are still available, and we’ll have coverage of the discussions next week.) I think the speaker lineup tells its own story about the state of AI investing. My conversation with Jared Cohen, Goldman Sachs’ president of global affairs, will kick off the day with the geopolitics of AI. It’s one of the most overlooked topics at these sorts of events, and it’s especially important given that such a crucial part of the AI supply chain (Taiwanese chip production) sits off the coast of China. Cohen, a former State Department official, has spent years writing about how “geopolitical swing states,” like the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, have immense power amid a broader geopolitical struggle between the U.S. and China. You can see that clearly as more AI investors, startups and tech firms make nice in the Middle East. We’ll then bring to the stage Karin Fronczke of Fidelity and Gavin Baker of Atreides Management, two investors close to some of the most important CEOs in AI. Fronczke runs private tech investing at Fidelity, the mutual fund that represents a crucial seal of approval for AI startups. It is an investor in top AI startups up and down the ecosystem, like OpenAI, CoreWeave and Databricks, and has nearly $20 billion invested in private companies overall. Baker is a hedge fund manager who perhaps was one of the earliest to see potential in Nvidia’s Jensen Huang. He began investing in the chipmaker more than two decades ago. He now backs Elon Musk’s xAI and several startups aiming to make data centers and chips more efficient, including two that made The Information 50 startups database. Some of the biggest investments are of course in the data center and energy infrastructure needed to run sophisticated AI models. Waldemar Szlezak is the $50 billion–dollar man of AI infrastructure. He’s the head of digital infrastructure for KKR, the giant private equity firm. Teaming with Energy Capital Partners, KKR will spend $50 billion to provide the vast amount of power AI data centers require. KKR believes the data center boom will require $250 billion in spending a year. Szlezak will sit next to Mike Forman, who has helped Blackstone expand its own data center empire through the acquisition of data center provider QTS Realty Trust. And Jigar Shah, gregarious former entrepreneur and current podcast host, has his finger on the pulse of how the energy industry is trying to power AI. He controlled $400 billion in loan authority to energy companies under President Joe Biden, a key part of the administration’s clean energy policy goals. Startup business models are also a debate flashpoint. Lin Qiao is a startup founder who thinks big tech doesn’t have to dominate AI. The startup she founded, Fireworks AI, is trying to make it easier, faster and cheaper for Uber, Samsung and Verizon to run their own AI models. She has raised $80 million from top investors including Sequoia Capital and Benchmark. She’ll be onstage with one of her investors, Eric Vishria of Benchmark Capital. The small elite group of tech investors has steered clear of the big AI model developers like OpenAI and Anthropic, instead focusing on AI apps and software companies. Closing out the conference is Hemant Taneja, a cerebral investor who doesn’t follow the crowd. He runs General Catalyst, the Silicon Valley firm most active in big AI deals, investing in leading AI startups like Anthropic. His firm has stretched the definition of venture capital by buying a hospital system and doing rollup deals of traditional businesses in the vein of private equity, in hopes of infusing them with AI technology. Last year, we profiled Taneja and looked at how he became controversial in growth-at-all-costs Silicon Valley circles for preaching a “responsible” approach to AI. I hope to see you there.
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