Jamie Dimon is optimistic that the country’s AI spending will pay off.
The JPMorgan CEO told CNBC’s Leslie Picker in a video interview that aired on Wednesday that he believes the billions pouring into AI infrastructure will ultimately prove worthwhile.
“In my own view, and I may be wrong, it’ll ultimately play out and pay out,” Dimon said. “These people are doing real calculations about what’s needed. They see what it costs to do the frontier models. They see what it costs to do inferencing. The need is going up dramatically.”
He said that AI spending is also driving the American economy, “because the increase alone is 1% of GDP, and next year it’s going to be another 1% of GDP increase.”
“You’ve got to get steel and cement and all these things to build the data centers,” he added.
When asked about whether a cooling AI market would be a threat to the nation’s economy, Dimon said that while there are “a lot of things to worry about,” this specific scenario is “not high on the list.”
JPMorgan has poured significant capital into tech and AI projects this year, with Dimon saying on a January earnings call that he didn’t want the bank to fall behind other Wall Street rivals and fintech companies.
“We are going to stay out front, so help us God,” he said in response to a question about the bank’s spending from Wells Fargo analyst Mike Mayo.
The bank then announced in February that it was planning to boost its technology budget to $19.8 billion this year, which included investments in some AI projects.
Since then, the company has pushed its engineers to use AI more, tracking their usage on internal dashboards. Business Insider saw screenshots of some of these tracking systems and spoke to current and former developers, most of whom were worried about being labeled as underperformers if their AI use didn’t increase.
During a second-quarter earnings call in July, Dimon said that AI has led to as much as a 40% reduction in jobs in some areas of the firm, but that it wouldn’t suddenly shrink its operational budget.
But that’s not to say he hasn’t been skeptical about high AI spending, particularly in recent months, as the tokenmaxxing trend has been on the decline. In July, the executive said during a CNBC appearance that companies need to be rational about AI spending, “like any other resource we use.”
The company’s AI leadership is also undergoing a reset following the July announcement by its AI chief, Teresa Heitsenrether, that she would retire after four decades at the bank.
