New York City’s $325 billion pension system has started turning down private-market AI deals it considers strong on the merits, because it already owns too much AI.
“It’s hard to diversify such a big portfolio under any circumstances because you’ve really got to be in every asset class, and we are in every major economy on Earth. But now so much of that, sector by sector, market by market, is AI,” NYC Comptroller Mark Levine said on this week’s episode of Semafor’s . That level of “over-concentration” is “a risk that we’re leery of.”
It’s getting harder to find places to hide: AI-heavy companies account for almost half of S&P 500 market value, 40% of US high-yield bonds sold this year, and one in every six dollars of blue-chip corporate debt. Everything else, from private credit to real estate to Asian stocks, is increasingly a dressed-up bet on data centers.
On the flip side, owning so much of the AI buildout also gives the city’s chief financial officer some leverage over the tech CEOs running the companies, and he isn’t happy with them. He called CEOs’ appearance at Trump’s state dinner for China in September “a national embarrassment,” saying they’d “kissed the ring” of a president who is himself “a massive threat to pulling off the AGI transition safely.”
