Fed minutes expose a blind spot at the heart of the AI boom

The AI buildout has become the defining capital-spending story of this decade, with hyperscalers scaling data centers, chip supply chains expanding, and power and cooling projects breaking ground across regions. Yet the Federal Reserve’s January meeting minutes quietly flagged a problem regulators can’t simply model away: a meaningful slice of this boom is being financed in “opaque private markets” that “warranted monitoring.” That line reads less like a footnote and more like a structural blind spot in the most crowded investment narrative of the cycle.​ What the Fed actually said In its financial-stability discussion, the minutes noted “elevated equity market valuations,” a “high concentration of market values and activities in a small number of firms,” and “increased debt financing” tied…