Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said this week that demand to finance AI infrastructure remains very strong, pushing back against a Wall Street selloff driven partly by fears that AI spending has become unsustainable.
Solomon’s comments, delivered at an investor conference and widely reported on November 9, come at a moment when AI-linked stocks have been sliding and investors have grown increasingly nervous about how much debt and capital the industry’s biggest players are taking on to build data centers, buy chips and train ever larger models. Rather than downplaying the scale of that spending, Solomon argued that the underlying appetite to finance it, from banks, private credit funds and institutional investors alike, has not weakened even as public equity markets have gotten jumpy.
A selloff built on AI bubble fears
The broader market backdrop explains why Solomon’s comments landed the way they did. Software and AI-adjacent stocks have taken a beating in recent weeks as investors reassess just how much revenue these companies actually need to generate to justify the capital pouring into them. Some of that reassessment has been triggered by specific companies cutting their own funding targets, and some of it is simply the market getting nervous after a run of valuations that climbed faster than the underlying businesses.
Goldman’s own trading desk and research arm have been tracking this shift closely, and Solomon’s framing draws a distinction worth paying attention to: a stock-price correction is not the same thing as a collapse in financing appetite. Banks still see enough demand, and enough collateral value in the physical infrastructure being built, to keep underwriting deals. That is a meaningfully different signal than if lenders had started pulling back from the sector altogether.
Solomon has also pushed back specifically on the idea that the recent software sector rout reflects a broad verdict on AI’s prospects, calling that reading of the selloff too sweeping. His argument is that investors are repricing a handful of specific, often debt-heavy bets rather than losing confidence in AI infrastructure spending as a category, a distinction that matters enormously for how lenders decide which deals to keep funding.
Why the distinction matters
This split between public market sentiment and private financing appetite has shown up elsewhere recently too. OpenAI reportedly scaled back one of its funding targets by roughly twenty billion dollars earlier this year, a sign that even the most prominent AI companies are recalibrating their capital plans as the economics of frontier model training get re-examined. Teck Hustlers covered that adjustment when OpenAI trimmed its funding ask, and the pattern there was not retreat so much as discipline: raising what is actually needed rather than what the market might have been willing to hand over at peak enthusiasm.
Solomon’s comments suggest that lenders are making a similar distinction. The AI buildout is expensive almost beyond precedent, with hundreds of billions of dollars committed to data centers, specialized chips and power infrastructure across just a handful of companies. But expensive is not the same as unfinanceable, and Goldman’s position is that the deals keep getting done because the underlying assets, land, power contracts, chips, data center shells, carry real resale and collateral value even if a particular AI company’s equity valuation gets choppy.
The IPO test waiting in the wings
That framing is about to get a real-world test. Anthropic is preparing to go public with a price range that would value the company near a trillion dollars, and how that offering is received will say a lot about whether Solomon’s confidence in financing demand extends to public equity investors as well as private lenders. A strong debut would support the idea that the selloff is a sentiment wobble rather than a fundamental repricing. A weak one would suggest the market has further to fall before AI valuations find a floor that both equity and credit investors are comfortable with.
For now, Goldman’s message is a note of reassurance aimed less at retail investors watching ticker symbols bounce and more at the companies and infrastructure builders who need to know whether the capital spigot is still open. Solomon’s answer, delivered directly into a nervous market, was yes.
The bottom line
Wall Street’s AI jitters have not translated into a financing freeze, at least according to the bank best positioned to know. David Solomon says demand to fund AI infrastructure remains strong even as public markets wobble, and that gap between stock-price anxiety and lending appetite is worth watching closely as more AI-linked offerings, including Anthropic’s looming IPO, come to market in the weeks ahead.
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