“If it slows down relative to someone's ambitions, it doesn't really create a problem in my mind. All it means is gratification delayed. … Once you put a shovel in the ground, and by shovel I mean dollars, time is money.”
Thoughts on the Market · Money & Markets · November 2026
Context
Asked how credit markets would handle a slowdown in AI capex, Dan Toscano says missing management's ambitions is not the danger. The risk is money already committed to a construction site, which assumes an environment friendly to building data centers.
Transcript
…finance and structured credit is not a new phenomenon. How and when does cash get dispersed and who controls those decisions? So you can protect yourself that if something's going wrong, you don't have cash hemorrhaging out of the system uncontrollably. Things like that, they really matter. You
…is people or power availability, cost of capital, or, you know, potential policy constraints, you know, some sort of a slowdown in AI CapEx is viewed rather cautiously by the equity markets. How do you think credit markets will handle a slowdown for any number of reasons in the pace of CapEx spend?
Yeah. Well, I mean, I think the pace of CapEx spend gets measured against companies' ambitions, not anything else. It's we see an opportunity, we would like to take advantage of that opportunity. In order to do so, we need to build capacity, right? So what happens? Client says, I want this thing built yesterday, not in a week. Okay. So if it slows down relative to someone's ambitions, it doesn't really create a problem in my mind. All it means is gratification delayed. So I think this can speed up. I think it can slow down as fast as people are comfortable. And when I say people, I mean investors putting capital behind management teams. But I also think management teams feeling comfortable that they can control what they're doing. And when they're building capacity, if they're buying chips or selling chips or trafficking in compute, they can speed up or slow…
So last question for you, Dan. I know you're a big UConn basketball fan. Other than the UConn basketball team prospects, what keeps you up at night in the context of AI financing?
Yeah, look, I mean, AI keeps a lot of people up at night. It doesn't keep me up at night. What keeps me up at night is UI.
U of I, University of Illinois, Fighting Illini, ranked number three ahead of UConn. May I remind you?
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