BlackRock CEO Larry Fink: AI can't happen without a huge investment in infrastructure

David, good to be here. I hope you can deal with all this noise, but nice to have noise though, right? Never say that’s a bad thing. IPO’s are always a good thing. Brings more capital into the market, expands the capital markets. Yeah, actually we might want to get to that with you, but let’s start off with the earnings themselves. You know, on the call you’re talking about the uncertain backdrop, of course, but it doesn’t mean there’s a lack of opportunities. You had decent inflows this quarter interestingly more into fixed income perhaps in other areas although maybe that was expected. I think in the, in the, in the in a period of so much uncertainty with growing fear, more anxiety throughout the world. People are staying a little close and you know we’ve had $9 trillion of money now into money market funds, record levels and some of that money is going into fixed income. But the alternative though, if you were fully invested in the equity market, you would have made 25% return. So, and this is what I try to talk about, it’s not about the moment, yes, there’s uncertainty, but over the long run, do you believe in American style capitalism? Do you believe in the markets? And over the long run, I do believe our market is going to continue to be driving excess returns above what you could earn in a money market, right. And on the call you talked about what you believe are still great opportunities. Your words for investors across a number of structural trends, I might expect that those include the likes of what AI, what else? Well, the combination AI cannot truly happen unless there’s a huge investment in the infrastructure. The, the amount of energy that is required for AI for is enormous and the amount of power generation we ought we will run out of electricity if we are going to fully adapt a full AI world. And so the need to build out and this is all going to stimulate our economy. By the way the build out of more AI and which at the backside is that means building out more electricity power whether the data centers, datacenters and all that. And we’re going to have to be building out, you know, 10s and 10s of giga, you know gigawatts, not like not megawatts, gigawatts and that’s we’re talking trillions of dollars of investing. And so the opportunity is enormous in the coming years. And this is one of the fundamental reasons why I believe the United States is leading this. But let’s be clear, I’m talking to political leaders in other countries and that that their desire to build up data centers, AI, technology at the same time decarbonization. So This is why I remain to be a little more constructive, why I believe there’s elevated inflation in the world and I I think all of this is playing out. But back to our earnings, you know we had a record amount of assets, one $10.5 trillion, all of it’s our clients money, more than 50% of it is retirement. And we saw flows across the board worldwide. We had active flows where it’s still in many cases active outflows are occurring in the industry. We had inflows and so the resiliency of our business is only accelerating for the first time in a long time. I noted our pipeline has never been stronger of noted wins that are going to fund in the future. And So what we see is acceleration in our business model.