The head of BlackRock's fundamental equities global technology team is making one of the boldest claims yet about the scale of what artificial intelligence is doing to the world economy.
Tony Kim told MarketWatch that AI is actively rewiring the global economy and that the process is far from over. His comparison was stark: the transformation, he said, is like running ten Manhattan Projects at the same time.
The Manhattan Project employed more than 130,000 people, cost roughly $2 billion in 1940s dollars, and delivered a technological leap that reshaped geopolitics within years. Kim's invocation of that scale — multiplied by ten — signals that he sees the current wave of AI investment and deployment not as a gradual productivity shift but as a rupture.
Kim runs BlackRock's global technology equities team within its fundamental equities division, making him one of the firm's central voices on where capital should flow as the AI buildout accelerates. BlackRock is the world's largest asset manager, with more than $10 trillion under management, and its public statements on sector positioning carry weight with institutional investors worldwide.
His comments arrive as technology stocks remain the dominant driver of equity market performance, with AI-related infrastructure spending continuing to climb. Major cloud providers, chipmakers, and data center operators have each reported surging capital expenditure in recent quarters, with executives across the sector describing demand for AI compute as outpacing supply.
Kim's framing goes further than most, situating AI not as a technology trend within the economy but as a force restructuring the economy itself — supply chains, labor markets, capital allocation, and corporate strategy included. He said the rewiring will continue.
For investors, the implication is that the AI trade is not in a late stage but an early one, at least by BlackRock's read. Whether that translates to sustained equity gains depends on execution across hundreds of companies and governments simultaneously — a coordination challenge that has no direct historical precedent, Manhattan Projects notwithstanding.