“Around about 60% of investors, we asked them a question… AI financing is going to be a problem for the foreseeable future. Only 60% said yes. By definition, what's happened over the past couple of weeks means that answer should be 100%, right?… So what's happening in the AI trade, to me, is evidence of almost a denial of a reality that's already here.”
Odd Lots · Money & Markets · October 2026
Context
Barclays' head of equities tactical strategies, talking to Odd Lots right after neocloud financing strains spilled into CoreWeave's bonds. He cites his own investor survey as evidence that the market is in denial about AI financing.
Transcript
…then it spilled over. But like, quite frankly, if you look at the data center bonds in isolation, whether like the beignets of this world, you know, these. That's the meta one. Exactly. These had already been widening for months prior to that. Right. And we'd seen a creep in IG hyperscaling. Cypher
is one of these ones that pivoted from Bitcoin mining to getting into AI. Yeah.
Yeah. All right. So I guess the point I'm trying to make is, is that there's ripple effects in financing that start in the periphery. And we're seeing that. So what I find amazing, back to the original point in terms of you asked, what's going on? Are people bullish or bearish? And we literally just conducted a survey with a group of investors. Yeah. And the only, I mean, you could make this argument, this is a high number, but from the responses that we've got so far, around about 60% of investors, we asked them a question, do you think financing is going to be a problem? AI financing is going to be a problem for the foreseeable future. Only 60% said yes. By definition, what's happened over the past couple of weeks means that answer should be 100%, right? And yet, let's just call it just over half think or just under half think there is no financing issue, but there is. So what's happening in AI Trade me is evidence of like almost a denial of a reality that's already here.
To be fair, one of the reasons Core Weave started selling off was because Brandon McBee gave an interview to the FT where he was talking literally about unlimited amounts of borrowing, which I think ties into what you're discussing when it comes to capital concerns. So on the financing side, I…
That is exactly it. Right. Because, you know, part of the job that my team does is we travel the world, we talk to a lot of different investors. We ask questions, we collate the kind of feedback that informs our decisions. And there was this almost universal view that, and you guys would have heard…
Yeah.
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