Ken Griffin
Citadel's Ken Griffin on AI, US-China Tensions, and US Data Centers (July 2026)
Citadel had an early return to office policy and Ken considers that a huge advantage.
Humans are social creatures and mentors are critical to our growth.
Citadel helped the government pay big pharma to mass produce vaccines before FDA approval so the vaccine was ready for mass distribution upon approval.
We are seeing all-time highs in the S&P while there is war in the Middle East for the following reasons:
- US is somewhat shielded
- China has been able to dramatically reduce their consumption of oil. He didn't see China oil demand being so elastic.
- There has been an episodic flow of oil and natural gas from the straits.
Citadel has been a huge user of machine learning since Tensorflow came out around 10 years ago.
The US has undergone a digital revolution over the last 10 years that has been accelerating.
Corporate earnings in America are at all-time highs.
One team member built an agent to assess academic finance papers. It used to take 6-8 weeks to reproduce a paper. They find a few ideas per year doing this tactic. The AI agent can do this in 2-3 hours per paper. This is a masters/PhD level job. AI can take on some really difficult tasks.
Competitive moats are being filled in at lightning speed. This means we are likely to see a golden age of entrepreneurial activities. Entrepreneurs will be able to launch new businesses and take on incumbents.
Portfolio management will reward the employees that have a good vision on the companies with products and services that are transforming society. The market will reward this more in the future rather than those who are good at predicting quarterly earnings.
Those who can see what is unfolding in the years to come will be very valuable.
All the available compute is more or less consumed at all times now. There is a lot of inflation in compute costs and only the high margin businesses will survive.
China is one of the most innovative and fast growing economies in the world. They have a large population, big focus on education, and lots of graduates with STEM degrees. They are training the employees that are needed in the future.
The US needs to educate our youth to compete with their contemporaries across the ocean.
Solar panels are generally made in China using coal energy, so they take 7 years to give a positive carbon output.
Wind turbines last for 15 years, are made of carbon fiber, and then break down and fill landfills.
We don't have an energy source that is truly clean.
The US is one of the few nations that has meaningfully brought down its carbon output because of natural gas.
Monitoring and maintaining exposure so you can have tolerable losses is very important.
They believe the hedge fund cost of capital is the risk free rate + 4%.
The biggest investors in Citadel are Ken and his partners. He thinks investors should always look for this.