Good evening and welcome to Markets Desk, your end-of-day read on what's moving the needle.
The AI economy is showing some uncomfortable parallels to the dotcom era, and strategist Amy Webb is sounding the alarm. Her warning is pointed: CEOs are buying abundance in AI infrastructure without budgeting for what that abundance actually costs to sustain. Pilot programs are multiplying, returns are not, and the gap between investment and monetization is widening fast.
That pressure is already reshaping how engineers work. At Cisco, senior director Sergio Freitas now oversees between ten and twenty AI agents daily, each managing their own downstream agents. He says the hours haven't stretched, but the pace has sharpened considerably. More code is being written, which means more code demands review, and the cognitive load of that accountability is real.
Meanwhile, the nuclear power race to feed those same data centers is heating up. Oklo and X-Energy are both chasing the title of first small modular reactor to deliver commercial power, and the stakes are enormous. Electricity, not chips, is the binding constraint on AI expansion right now, which makes whoever flips that switch first a very significant player in the infrastructure buildout.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
