BlackRock's Ben Powell: Stay Calm, AI's Real Bet Is Power

Powell's appearance at Astana Finance Days 2026 placed the AI boom inside a broader argument about a more complicated investment world. He said geopolitical fragmentation, higher inflation and higher interest rates are pushing investors toward more targeted decisions across geographies, asset classes and long-term themes, and he warned that there will be more geopolitical flashpoints.

The twist is where he locates the opportunity. Powell said the boom is not simply a technology-and-software story, describing AI as a structural transformation — "turning sand into thinking" — whose real bottlenecks sit in physical supply, such as power, semiconductors, memory and copper. Because many AI companies remain privately held, he also argued that exposure to the sector may increasingly require private markets, and that balance-sheet-constrained governments are adding to demand for private capital.

For readers weighing this, the outlook Powell sketched hinges on two things he flagged rather than resolved: whether private-market and private-credit growth comes with disciplined underwriting and credit quality, and whether regulation and market infrastructure develop enough for tokenization to become ordinary. Kazakhstan's path to emerging market status, which he called an important but not final milestone, sits within that same selective, liquidity-sensitive frame.