PremiumAmerica Builds, Europe Pays: Apollo's Slok Charts The AI Boom's One-Way Street
If you want to know who is actually building the AI economy, follow the capex. If you want to know who is paying for it anyway, follow the bond yields. One continent shows up in the first set of charts. The other shows up mostly in the second.
That is the gist of a sprawling new 54-slide chartbook from Apollo's Torsten Slok and Huw van Steenis, the firm's new European economic and policy strategist (who joined in August), titled "The macro implications of the AI investment boom: US and Europe" (available to pro subs). Slide after slide, the verdict reads like a scoreboard from a game Europe forgot it was playing: capex, chips, data centers, models, patents, R&D, worker adoption, productivity, earnings and market cap. The US wins nearly every category, usually by a multiple.