Trickle-Down AI-conomics

Mariya Entina, CPA, CFA
Portfolio Manager

Mariya Entina, a Portfolio Manager on DoubleLine’s Corporate Credit team, identifies the surge in AI-infrastructure capex as a two-edged sword that, while visible in certain high-flying stocks, remains an underrated risk among investment grade corporate bond issuers in industries outside the technology sector. “U.S. investment grade (IG) companies in the first quarter of 2026 posted their strongest quarterly earnings in years while recording the IG cohort’s largest cash drawdown on record,” Ms. Entina writes. “Capital expenditure (capex) connects the two. AI spending is no longer a hyperscaler story. AI expenditures flow through supply chains into utilities, industrial manufacturers and infrastructure suppliers across the IG index. Consequently, a capex slowdown would impair earnings well beyond a prominent, closely followed group of technology firms to impact a wide set of IG issuers.” Given the concentration IG bonds’ exposure to AI capex and the inconspicuousness of this risk, Ms. Entina warns that many investors might be at risk of, and unaware of, correlated risks to an AI-driven investment bubble in their supposedly high-grade fixed-income allocations. “DoubleLine’s Corporate Credit team,” she writes, “factors this overlooked risk dimension into its ongoing assessment of corporate credits.”

“Active credit management in this environment is not about picking AI winners,” according to Ms. Entina. “It is about sizing a theme that benchmark exposure already delivers in abundance and exercising a deliberate effort to select names that will hold up if AI capex growth proves less durable than a naïve extrapolation from current spending might imply.”

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