Evidence of productivity growth benefiting from AI remained elusive, said ABS Australian Statistician Dr David Gruen, who participated in the same panel discussion.
GDP per capita growth in the year to June was 0.2 per cent, which Gruen described as “sluggish”.
“There’s obviously a fair bit of technological change, but it’s not clear to me that that technological change… is material on the aggregate scale,” said Gruen.
“If it was, you ought to be seeing faster productivity growth, and we’re not, just about anywhere.”
Data centres are critical for the expansion of the AI-driven economy as they provide the computing capacity needed for the complex data-crunching behind the technology.
In February, Future Fund upped its stake in data centre developer and operator CDC, the “largest operator and developer of data centres across Australia and New Zealand”, to 34.6 per cent.
A June speech by Future Fund board chair Greg Combet, a former Labor minister, said the fund believed “that AI is coming faster than perhaps many anticipate”.
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“Data centres, energy infrastructure and renewable generation all expose the Future Fund to what … will be a sustained growth story in the advancement and adoption of artificial intelligence,” said Combet in a speech to the Committee for Economic Development of Australia.
Goldman Sachs has suggested a mainstream uptake of generative AI could result in productivity growth of 15 per cent “when fully adopted”.
AI stocks have had an extraordinary rise, with chip-making giant Nvidia last month becoming the first public company to have a market capitalisation of $US5 trillion – an amount roughly twice the size of Australia’s entire sharemarket.
US hedge fund manager Michael Burry, who successfully bet against subprime mortgages in the lead-up to the 2008 global financial crisis, last week reportedly made a U$1.1 billion bet against the share prices of two AI powerhouses – Nvidia and Palantir technologies.
Given its large presence in global markets, the Future Fund is a major investor in the US sharemarket, which has been propelled higher this year by strong growth in technology stocks, which are benefiting from hype surrounding AI.
In Combet’s June speech, he also warned that the United States had become a riskier investment destination and was likely to attract a smaller share of global capital flows, saying the Trump administration had “added layers of volatility and uncertainty” to financial markets.
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