Descriptions:
At an AI mini-summit in Saudi Arabia hosted by Peter Diamandis and Link Exponential Ventures, a three-person panel examines the capital dynamics driving the global AI buildout. The panelists are Anjane Mida, partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and board member of Mistral who backed Anthropic; Bonnie Chan, CEO of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and Clearing since March 2024; and David Blondon, managing partner of Link Exponential Ventures with a reported 44% IRR across 23 startups and over $1 billion AUM.
Mida estimates roughly $1 billion per day is currently flowing into AI in the United States, with projections reaching $3 billion per day by 2030. He explains that all of a16z’s funds — infrastructure, applications, and healthcare — are now effectively AI funds, and describes the funding challenge through the lens of Jevons Paradox: algorithmic efficiency gains consistently generate more demand for compute rather than reducing it, particularly as reasoning models produce approximately 10 times more tokens than prior-generation generative models.
Chan offers a capital markets perspective, noting that current AI investment remains undifferentiated — money is flowing into energy, chips, and applications without valuation discipline — but predicts this will change as clearer return profiles emerge. She highlights China’s structural advantages in green energy infrastructure, manufacturing density, and AI-embedded industrial processes as factors that could shape the next phase of global AI competition. The discussion also touches on why the AI funding stack has forced traditional venture firms to pull in sovereign wealth funds, strategic investors like Nvidia, and hyperscaler balance sheets to fund infrastructure at the required scale.
📺 Source: Peter H. Diamandis · Published January 02, 2026
🏷️ Format: Interview
