Ye Tan: Internet Era Ending, AI Growth Already Underway

Ye Tan's framing matters less as a forecast than as a signal of how Chinese capital allocators are repositioning: AI infrastructure is being treated as the rare pocket of sustained spending while broader investment contracts. The caution that sector growth does not equal profitable investments is the more useful half of the remark, since it implicitly distinguishes the infrastructure buildout from the returns achievable further up the stack. For crypto and RWA markets, the relevant question is whether that capital intensity eventually pulls tokenized compute, data or energy assets into the same narrative — and whether the gap between growth and profitability narrows or widens.