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JPMorgan Chase (JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon has his doubts that the AI spending boom will turn out the way investors are hoping for. Still, he's willing to entertain one of the AI build-out's more extraordinary projects: SpaceX's ambition to put data centers in space.
"When I look at AI itself, the amount of money being spent is huge. Will it, in total, pay off? Probably, just like the internet did. Will it pay off the way you expect in the timetable you expect? Definitely not," Dimon said during a recent interview on the Master Investor Podcast with Wilfred Frost.
When asked if the market is pricing in a perfect outcome of the AI boom, Dimon said, "Not perfect, but probably a good outcome."
Dimon added that companies may control spending on generative AI usage and seek out cheaper ways of using the technology, which "will cause some of the issues out there." Recently, the release of another cheap Chinese AI model, Kimi K3, has caused a stir in the US tech industry.
Dimon is far from the only Wall Street chief to throw caution on the AI gold rush.
"It won't be without bumps and recalibrations," Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said of the AI boom during the bank's earnings call last week.
During the same podcast interview, Dimon described rocket maker SpaceX (SPCX) — one of the companies at the center of the spending boom — as "extraordinary."
He praised the company's satellite internet business and defended the feasibility of one of its more far-flung AI plays: space data centers.
"I've seen numbers on the data centers in space that can actually work … if it works, you're talking about very cheap energy, cheap cooling, very stable," Dimon said.
JPMorgan Chase reported the highest quarterly profit in US banking history last week, with major windfalls coming from AI-related deals and stock trading. The bank earned hundreds of millions of dollars in fees advising on SpaceX's monster IPO and other mega deals tied to AI.
Dimon interviewed Musk as part of the rocket maker's investor roadshow ahead of its public listing. JPMorgan also hosted over a hundred SpaceX employees and executives at its midtown Manhattan headquarters for the company's post-IPO listing party on June 12.
SpaceX's stock rose in its first three days of trading but has since tumbled, reaching a new low on Monday before regaining ground on Tuesday. The stock is down more than 5% from its initial listing price.When asked how much he thought about SpaceX's listing price, Dimon said "quite a bit." In the IPO process, SpaceX upended the standard Wall Street process for establishing a price range by calling for a flat price of $135 per share.
"They said there's a price, which is kind of a different way to do it," Dimon said.
David Hollerith covers a range of developments throughout the financial sector, from Wall Street to banking and asset management to crypto and fintech. Email him at [email protected]. Follow him on X at @DsHollers.
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