09/05/2026
Remember the dot-com boom?
Venture capital grew from $8 billion in 1995 to $100 billion in 2000, almost entirely on a single story: the internet was going to change everything, get in now or get left behind. And the internet did change everything. But when the money flooded in faster than the fundamentals could hold, the bubble burst, and most of the wealth that was created stayed with the people who got in early and got out smart.
Regular people, small business owners, everyday investors? They held the bag. AI is being built the same way, and cheap money is making it worse.
Right now, five companies are on track to spend $1 trillion on AI infrastructure by 2027. NVIDIA controls up to 90 percent of the chips that power AI. Three companies, OpenAI, AWS, and Microsoft, account for 84 percent of the entire AI market. And 91 percent of AI research in 2024 ran on NVIDIA hardware. This is not a marketplace. It is a closed club, and the entry fee is $100 million just to train a competitive model.
Here is what makes it more complicated. There is a real historical lesson about what happens when interest rates are kept artificially low for too long. In the 1970s, a Fed chairman named Arthur Burns held rates down under political pressure. Inflation ran above 7 percent for years. By the time anyone was willing to fix it, rates
had to go to 19 percent and it took two recessions to climb back out.
The people who suffered most were not the ones with assets.
They were the ones living paycheck to paycheck. That same dynamic is playing out in AI right now. Cheap capital flows to the biggest players. The Federal Reserve has documented that $18 trillion in post-COVID wealth gains went overwhelmingly to people who already owned assets.
A 100 basis point rate cut increases the wealth share of the top 1 percent (peer-reviewed research from UMass Amherst). And only 29 percent of small business owners say they can currently afford a
loan right now. Credit for small businesses has tightened for 11 straight quarters.
So when the AI boom concentrates and credit stays tight for everyone else, who wins? Not the small business owner. Not the independent developer. Not your neighbor trying to compete with a national chain.
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AI should lift everyone. That is the whole point.
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