Goldman CEO watching for election-driven volatility around data centers

By Saeed Azhar and Pritam ‌Biswas

NEW YORK, Oct ​13 (Reuters) - ​Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said on Tuesday it would be interesting to watch for political volatility around AI centers ahead of midterm elections.

Speaking ‌at an analysts' call for quarterly earnings, he also said as the ⁠financing needs for AI projects grow and there is pressure on rates, it could affect the returns ‌and the viability of certain ‌projects.

"Localized political volatility around data centers. You know, we've got an election coming up. It'll be interesting to see," Solomon said.

"Obviously there's a lot of political discussion ​coming into an election, but then you also have to see how states and localities act coming out of elections. All these things can create you know ⁠volatility, and there's uncertainty around them."

Data centers, which provide the computing power needed to train and run AI models, ​have faced growing opposition from communities across the United States.

Residents have raised concerns about their rising electricity demand, the potential for higher ​utility bills and other environmental impacts on local ‌communities.

The artificial intelligence buildout is on track to require a larger share of U.S. output than the rollout of electricity, railroads, interstate ⁠highways or the internet, with an increasingly complicated financial structure that poses potentially systemic risks, according to a new study.

The expansion will consume around 3.6% of gross domestic product annually through 2032, ⁠or more than $10 trillion, and is using ever more intricate financing arrangements, Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, a ​finance and real estate professor at Columbia Business School, wrote in a paper prepared for a Brookings Institution conference last month.

"There's going to be infrastructure built around it that's going to be ‌quite significant," Goldman's Solomon.

"But we feel very well positioned to bring the full range of services and participate actively, and we still ‌see an enormous amount of activity."

Goldman is a financial partner with Nvidia, which in August announced ⁠it has partnered with six major ‌financial institutions to launch compute ​platforms aimed at raising over $500 billion in third-party capital for AI infrastructure.

(Reporting by Saeed Azhar and Pritam Biswas; Editing by Mark Porter and ‌Nick Zieminski)

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