Between fishing outings and poker games, veteran finance pros shared fears about the artificial-intelligence trade. Barry Norton was a half-hour into his talk on scientific breakthroughs in artificial intelligence when he was asked the most important question on Wall Street. The crowd of money managers, economists and other finance types had made their annual pilgrimage to this fishing mecca in Maine’s wilderness, trading suits for T-shirts and cargo pants. As they drained their wine glasses in the wood-paneled dining room, Norton had them transfixed: The longtime tech investor laid out how chip design would one day be so intricate and efficient that engineers would literally be moving molecules.

Then a hand went up: All these AI advances are costing U.S. companies trillions of dollars. Will there be a return on that investment?\n\n‘I can’t answer the question, and Wall Street can’t answer the question,’ said Norton, standing in the corner of the room, replicas of fish and birds pinned to the walls behind him. ‘I don’t know that yet. I worry about that.’ You wouldn’t know it from glancing at major stock indexes or Micron’s share price, but behind closed doors, Wall Street’s anxiety about AI is reaching new heights.

Big tech companies that once had indestructible balance sheets are now cash flow negative. The spending not shown on balance sheets is even greater. Expectations for revenue growth are off the charts and companies like Open AI are struggling to keep up.

The world’s most valuable company, Nvidia, is nurturing an entirely new asset class to keep chip sales humming.\n\nThe paradox in the AI trade—investors are questioning the hype even as they pour money in—was everywhere at Camp Kotok, an invite-only weekend getaway for pros from across the finance world. On canoes, over coffee and around the poker table, attendees (or “campers,” as they are referred to here) debated whether the earnings from the big AI spending binge will materialize or the market is headed for pain. No one really knows.

But no players are ready to take their chips off the table. ‘The level of spending has gotten so extraordinary that we have no choice but to jaw drop at it and wonder how all of this is going to turn out,’ said Peter Boockvar, the chief investment officer at One Point BFG Wealth Partners and a longtime attendee of Camp Kotok. At the same time, he said, ‘there’s a party going on. People don’t want to leave early.’\n\nOne evening, a frank debate played out over a poker game.

There was definitely overinvestment in data centers, one camper argued. But wasn’t that always the case with a major new technology? Look at the internet or railroads, another argued: Each was marked by a wave of euphoria, then the eventual sorting of the winners and losers. And what to make of Leopold Aschenbrenner, whose AI-focused hedge fund Situational Awareness was nearly destroyed by a selloff in some AI stocks just days before the Kotok gathering? He’s a kid, some players shrugged.

An inexperienced investor who had learned one of the market’s most basic and painful lessons—borrow too much, get burned. Later, some campers privately fretted that the downfall of Aschenbrenner’s firm was something far more serious, said camp organizer and veteran money manager David Kotok. Maybe it was the kind of ‘cockroach’ that JPMorgan Chase Chief Executive Jamie Dimon has warned about when talking about private credit—one problem that signaled there would be more.

The event itself is designed for these kinds of rambling discussions and unfettered hot takes. Kotok started bringing a group of market wonks up to this tiny town in Maine some 25 years ago. Since then, the gathering has welcomed financiers, policymakers and subject-matter experts of all kinds, many of them handpicked by Kotok himself. ‘The Walden woods for Wall Street,’ one camper calls it.

Or more simply: ‘nerd camp.’.