The numbers coming out of Wall Street’s most influential research shop tell a story that Silicon Valley would rather not hear.
In two separate reports published in April, Goldman Sachs examined the great AI infrastructure build-out from opposite ends of the telescope — one team studying how much the machine will cost to build, another studying whether the machine is actually working — and arrived at a rare institutional moment: two wings of a single firm arguing, simultaneously, that the big question on return on investment is still extremely sensitive to a few levers that aren’t as well understood as they should be. Everyone knows it’s a big hill to climb, but the size of it might still be unexpected.
