At the end of yet another dinner party dominated by AI chatter, I often ask myself whether other important topics have been crowded out. Applied to the economy more broadly, it's also worth asking whether AI mania is sucking resources from other sectors. Data centres and model development require vast quantities of chips, electricity and financing. Does the craze mean others are going without?

Over the long term, this will hopefully seem like a silly question. When AI has solved cancer and climate change, no one will be sniping about whether too much money and electricity were poured into the industry. There is no fixed lump of credit. Historically, innovation has made investment worthwhile, like when electrification made it viable to use a new class of small factory machines.

Here and now, though, constraints can bite. I wouldn't advise running energy-intensive manufacturing near a data centre, or stuffing cheap phones with the memory chips that make AI run. Financing should be more elastic, and will need to be, as the big tech companies turn to debt markets to help with the AI build-out. But other borrowers hungry for cheap credit could still face a squeeze.

Starting with financing flows, eyeballing the raw data, AI-related companies do seem to be eating up a growing share. Silicon Valley Bank reported that over the past 12 months AI companies have received almost two-thirds of US venture capital dollars. And according to Goldman Sachs, roughly a quarter of US gross investment-grade debt issuance this year has come from AI-related companies, including hyperscalers, software providers and data sector funders.