ASTANA – As artificial intelligence drives a new investment boom, the best strategy may be to resist the excitement and focus instead on the bottlenecks that could constrain its growth, according to Ben Powell, managing director and chief investment strategist for Asia-Pacific at the BlackRock Investment Institute.
Speaking on Sept. 9 during a fireside chat, Powell said investors should “stay calm” and look for the physical constraints created by the rapid expansion of AI. Photo credit: AFD 2026 Speaking at the Astana Finance Days 2026 forum on Sept. 9 during a fireside chat moderated by Assel Mukazhanova, chief executive officer of Astana International Exchange (AIX), Powell said investors should “stay calm” and look for the physical constraints created by the rapid expansion of AI.
“I know it’s very exciting. But try to be more boring and focus on the constraint. Constraint is opportunity, actually. This is the philosophical approach,” Powell said. For BlackRock, the current AI boom is not simply a story about technology companies and software.
Powell said the most interesting investment opportunities are increasingly emerging from the infrastructure required to make AI possible, including power, semiconductors, memory and copper. “We have a super boom, but we are short of copper. We are short of chip.
We are short of electrician. Where we are very focused is trying to be a little bit ahead of the next constraint,” he said. Among those constraints, power is currently the most significant opportunity, according to Powell, as the expansion of AI infrastructure drives rising demand for electricity and related infrastructure.
“Our favorite constraints at the moment is power,” he said. Powell described AI as a major structural transformation of the global economy, noting that its significance may still be underestimated. “We are turning sand into thinking,” he said, describing the technology as fundamentally different from conventional goods and services because intelligence can be applied across virtually every sector.
Yet for investors, he said, the task is to separate the scale of the technological transformation from the market excitement surrounding it. Powell also said the investment environment is becoming more encouraging in Kazakhstan, using the informal term “vibes” to describe a shift that is hard to capture through quantitative indicators alone.