Tom Lee Says Rising AI Debt Does Not Mean the Boom Has to End Badly

Tom Lee argues that rising debt across the AI industry does not automatically mean the boom is becoming unsustainable.
He sees AI as a potential new source of economic growth rather than simply another speculative cycle.
Lee points to $BTC rising from below $1,000 to around $80,000 as an example of how markets can dramatically underestimate the long-term impact of new technologies.
He also argues that major growth industries have rarely been financed entirely through equity.
From that perspective, AI companies issuing debt to fund data centers, chips and other infrastructure is not necessarily a warning sign by itself.
If AI becomes a major new driver of productivity and economic growth, Lee believes the most attractive opportunities may sit around the bottlenecks required to scale it.
That includes $NVDA, semiconductors, memory, energy and power infrastructure.
Prediction markets currently assign only about a 13% probability to the AI industry suffering a major downturn by December 31.
The bigger question is whether the returns generated by AI infrastructure ultimately justify the enormous amount of capital now being deployed.