Jon Gray Rebuts AI Bubble Warnings, Calls Demand ‘Parabolic’

Blackstone Inc. President Jon Gray pushed back on the notion that there’s an AI bubble, just days after billionaire Ken Griffin said investors are “almost certainly” in the midst of one.

“When you think about a bubble, you think about building capacity and then hoping the demand comes,” Gray said in an interview with Bloomberg TV Thursday after the firm reported its third-quarter results. “With AI, you’re building capacity, and you’re hoping you can keep up with the demand.”

It’s “a very different dynamic” from phenomena such as the 1990s telecom bubble, he said. Gray pointed to an AI consulting firm Blackstone created with Anthropic PBC called Ode.

“We can’t keep up with customer demand,” he said. “Demand is almost parabolic.”

Gray, 56, is making AI the biggest bet of his career, having amassed a $200 billion data-center empire and embedded AI into the hundreds of businesses Blackstone controls. But with the massive amount of spending going into data centers, some investors have likened the exuberance over AI to the lead-up to the dot-com crash.

Read More: Ken Griffin Says AI ‘Almost Certainly’ in a Bubble Right Now

For its part, Blackstone is pushing to build the infrastructure and long-term assets needed to power the AI boom, according to Gray. Speaking to Bloomberg, he acknowledged that so-called neoclouds — AI-first cloud computing providers like CoreWeave Inc. — have been struggling to obtain adequate financing.

“The main business for the neoclouds is quite good,” he said. “I think these neoclouds will find sources of capital.”