While announcing a $30 million investment at the Texas State Technical College in Waco last month, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said the US has to remain the leader in AI and that will require trillions of dollars of investments in the next few years.
He said all Americans must come together to make this possible, adding that the funds will come from the private sector, like pension accounts, retirement savings, and insurance companies.
Fink based his statements around national security concerns, highlighting that China could surpass the US in AI if innovation lags due to inadequate funding, and that the next few years are the most crucial.
Fink is also known for strongly supporting central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). He believes that asset tokenisation will revolutionise payments and lower fees, but has faced fierce resistance from the masses who see CBDCs as a threat to financial privacy that give governments total control over people's money.
Fink's latest comment on funding AI infrastructure with money from people's retirement savings triggered an instant meltdown on the social media platform X. Some users said 'they' want to fund our own dystopian nightmare, while others were concerned that tokenising every dollar you have saved for retirement could have extreme financial repercussions.
They want us to fund our own dystopian nightmare https://t.co/NFE9paB1Wt
— Kat A 🌸 (@SaiKate108) May 25, 2026
One user on the social media platform said that the US already has 5,381 data centres, which is 12 times more than China's, and there is no need to panic-build and impact common people's lives in the process. 'We can do this methodically, so the buildout doesn't destroy people's homes, driving up their energy costs, etc.,' wrote another X user.
He's saying he will tokenize every last cent we own and make it the world economic forums' money. Every dollar in your pension, 401k, saving account, you name it. These people are mad.
— Katrina (@verummultum) May 24, 2026
The Rise of Loans Backed by Retirement Funds
According to Moody's estimates, companies like Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle collectively have $662 billion in off-balance-sheet AI commitments, and accounting rules allow them to keep this away from reported numbers.
Now, to fund this infrastructure, private equity (PE) firms have been acquiring life insurance firms. This is because PE companies generally own illiquid assets that require funding. So, it takes over insurance firms that collect premiums from policyholders. These insurance firms then invest those premiums from the common people into the PE company's illiquid assets.
The PE firm proceeds to form a captive reinsurer offshore with lenient capital requirements to push the insurance risk onto the balance sheet abroad.
The Big Short's Michael Burry also recently explained how Elon Musk's AI deal with Nvidia is backed by a multi-billion-dollar loan funded by Apollo's insurance arm Athene, which sells hundreds of millions of dollars of annuities to retirees.
The investor, who is popular for making contrarian bets over the decades, had also highlighted the risks due to Nvidia's highly concentrated customers, and how a partial slowdown by any of those clients could create a massive hole in its numbers.
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