Summer 2025 Newsletter

Hi everyone, Jenson here!

I hope this email finds you well, and that you have all enjoyed your summer!

As a reminder, this email serves as an update on my life regarding my academic and professional development, as well as recommending something I have read or listened to recently. I will continue to send these out every three months or so. Please let me know if you wish to be removed from this email list, and I can easily remove you with no hard feelings. I know we all get too many emails. 

This update will be a bit shorter than others, as it mainly revolves around my summer internship at J.P. Morgan and the article recommendation. 

Summer Internship in J.P. Morgan’s Commercial Bank and Investment Bank: 

This summer, I interned at J.P. Morgan’s Seattle office in the Commercial Banking division of the Commercial and Investment Bank. For those unfamiliar with Commercial Banking, in short, it is the part of the banking industry that provides financial services to businesses. A big part of Commercial Banking is making loans to these clients and providing cash management solutions such as checking and savings accounts, similar to those you and I have. This is obviously a very simplified version of what Commercial Banking is. Commercial Banking is incredibly complicated, as I learned this summer, and is a core piece of JPM. In 2024, the Commercial and Investment Bank generated 40% of JPM’s revenue, or $70 billion, with $25 billion in net income.

While I am of course unable to go into the specifics, I can give an overview of some of the many things I learned and some highlights of the summer.

Some Things I Learned:

• How to build financial models to conduct base-case and downside-case sensitivity analyses to better understand loan repayment likelihood over the next ten years.

• Assigning a risk grade based on company financials and other outstanding factors.

• Calculating critical financial metrics from financial statements to get key metrics such as Debt Service Coverage Ratio (DSCR) and leverage ratios.

• Learned about dozens of different cash management (treasury) solutions that JPM had to offer its clients, and which services were better based on the client’s needs. 

• Gained an understanding of different loan structures, such as revolving lines of credit, term loans, asset-based lending, etc. 

• Public speaking. While I had considered myself to be a good public speaker before the internship, I had never presented in a high-stakes environment. Learning how to present calmly and clearly under pressure was another incredibly valuable takeaway from the internship.

• The steps that go into client prospecting, such as looking at a company’s website, LinkedIn, and other internal JPM resources, to find out how to best approach new clients. 

• How to organize PowerPoint presentations in a clear and efficient manner to allow for easy legibility and clarity when presenting to Associates, Vice Presidents, and senior management.

Some Highlights:

• The first week of the internship was a training week in New York City. This was my first time in New York, and being there with hundreds of other interns from the Commercial and Investment Bank, Asset and Wealth Management, Syndicated Finance, and more, was amazing. 

• Client visits: While I can’t say which clients I was able to visit, I was able to visit some fantastic clients, one of whom I have been a fan of for years. It was amazing to see behind the scenes how these companies function and how our work in the Commercial Bank helps these clients thrive.

• Mariners Game: During the last week of our internship, the internship class was treated to a Mariners game. It was a great final bonding experience and great to connect further with our intern managers and my fellow interns outside of the office. Not to mention, the Mariners won!

• I was also fortunate to meet with over 50 people from Seattle’s JPM office and across the country, and added most of them to this mailing list. The conversations with these professionals were incredibly insightful, and it meant a lot that such esteemed and busy people were willing to take time out of their day to meet with me, give me advice, and answer questions.

My nine weeks at J.P. Morgan were incredibly valuable and genuinely enjoyable. I learned a lot about the banking world and finance in general, and met some amazing people around the office and at the company. I have accepted my return offer in the Seattle office upon graduation from Santa Clara University in Spring 2026. I can’t wait to begin my career at one of the world’s premier banks and one of Fortune Magazine’s list of top 10 most admired companies, and ranked #1 for its commercial and investment bank, customer satisfaction, artificial intelligence capabilities, and more.

Life: 

• I am currently back on campus at Santa Clara University, but because I can graduate a quarter early from SCU, I have decided to take the quarter off in the Fall instead of the Spring, so while I am not currently in classes, I am reading a few books, one of which is about the history of Buddhism, taking some Coursera courses about the applications of AI in Finance and continuing my role as Treasurer for SCU Alpha Kappa Psi, the professional co-ed business fraternity that I am a part of. 

• Because I am not in class this quarter, I am traveling with my mom! We are going to India 🇮🇳, Nepal 🇳🇵, and Thailand 🇹🇭 for nearly three weeks. We will spend about five days in India and Thailand, and then nine days in Nepal. I have never been to any of these countries, so I am especially thrilled to have the opportunity to travel to them. 

What’s Next:

• I look forward to returning to class in my Winter and Spring quarters and finishing my college career.

• I am set to graduate in June 2026, and then just nine days later, I will begin my full-time role at J.P. Morgan in my Analyst Rotation. I will train with all the new first-year analysts in Chicago for the program's first few months. 🏙️

Recommendation: 

My recommendation for this mailing list is to look into the rapid rise of artificial intelligence and the concerning lack of return on investment from AI. A great article that highlights this phenomenon is The Wall Street Journal’s article “Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will it Ever Pay Off?” In my last quarterly update that I sent out in early July, I spoke about how AI will impact the job market, and in this update, I will be highlighting another concerning issue: an AI bubble. 

While I was not alive during the Dot-com bust, this article highlights many present-day parallels to this previous bubble. One standout example is OpenAI’s investments in data centers. Last week, executives at OpenAI laid out plans that would require “at least $1 trillion in data center investment, and Altman recently committed the company to pay Oracle an average of around $60 billion a year for servers in data centers in the coming years.” At the same time, however, OpenAI is set to make $13 billion in revenue this year, meaning they are spending heavily ahead of actual revenues, something that companies like Global Crossing, WorldCom, and 360Networks did in the late 1990s, leading to their bankruptcy. Even more concerning is that today’s numbers being invested in AI are much larger than the dot-com bubble. 

Last week, consultants at Bain & CO. estimated that this current wave of AI infrastructure spending “will require $2 trillion in annual AI revenue by 2030.” To put this in perspective, this is more than the “combined 2024 revenue of Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Nvidia.” Given an estimated $45 billion in revenue from AI products in 2024, revenue needs to increase by 4,344% in the next 5 years to reach the $2 trillion goal, which seems bullish even for an industry like AI. Additionally, given that an “MIT report found 95% of organizations surveyed are getting no return on their AI product investments,” revenue seems unlikely to increase to this required level.

The last thing worth mentioning from this article was the section about CoreWeave. CoreWeave has seen substantial growth and has racked up dozens of multi-billion-dollar deals with clients like Meta and OpenAI. However, debt and aggressive leasing have fueled much of this expansion. CoreWeave is currently on the hook for $56 billion in data center lease payments, while most of its rental agreements with AI companies only last two to five years. While CoreWeave could manage to refill these rental agreements after their current ones expire, there is the risk that CoreWeave will have to pay billions for underutilized infrastructure. This concern seems very similar to the dot-com bust, as the article points out, “if the wave of building proves far more than needed, or if tech companies pivot away from third-party providers, the risk is that CoreWeave’s data centers could end up like the dormant fiber optic cables that snaked through the U.S. in the 2000s.” 

Ultimately, through my recommendation, I hope to draw more attention to a possible AI bubble, help people see parallels between today’s AI boom and the dot-com bubble, and exert more caution in the coming years. There are clear similarities that can’t be ignored. With that, I have sold half of my Nvidia stock and will leave you with one last quote from Roger McNamee, a veteran tech investor highlighted in the WSJ article: “‘this industry can be successful as the most successful tech products ever introduced and still not justify the current levels of investment.’”