Eavesdrop in any breakfast taco spot near the Austin Convention Center during SXSW, and you’ll overhear one of two acronyms: SVB or AI. But you’ll probably hear SVB more often.

“I feel the Silicon Valley Bank presence here, it’s probably the number one thing people are talking about here, whereas yesterday, I would have said the number one thing we’re going to be talking about is AI,” Trevor Guthrie, co-founder of Giant Spoon, said on Saturday afternoon.

Guthrie isn’t alone—while many SXSW attendees expected AI and ChatGPT to dominate conversations, talk quickly turned to Silicon Valley Bank, as news of its failure broke on Friday, just as the festival began. 

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Regulators shut down the bank, leaving about $175 billion in deposits in limbo for a few days. On Monday, the FDIC announced depositors would have full access to their money.

Still, the weekend was fraught. Many of the funds housed at the bank were attached to tech companies and startups—some of which had representatives at SXSW.

Take Roku, for instance. The TV streaming company had $487 million (or about a quarter of its overall $1.9 billion in cash) held by SVB when it closed, according to a Roku filing on Friday. Just hours later, Roku hosted its “Roku City” SXSW activation—a multi-story, interactive recreation of its Roku City screensaver. 

Even SVB was in town for SXSW, hosting a private dinner with a law firm on Thursday night.

‘An exclamation point’

Media Monks co-founder Wesley ter Haar said that the SVB closure adds “an exclamation point” to the broader economic downturn conversations happening at SXSW. Those conversations started about nine months ago around this idea that “eternal growth, and the endless growth of the tech sector and tech companies was plateauing,” he said.

“There might be quite a few people looking at their activations and parties and worrying about if they should have maybe used that money for payroll next week,” ter Haar said (though there’s no way brands could have known what was to come with the bank when planning for SXSW).

Despite all the SVB chatter, people in Austin by no means stopped discussing AI.

“The weather during SXSW is always unpredictable. While the SVB storm front may have overshadowed the weekend for start-up conversations, there continued to be clearer skies for AI,” Guthrie said. 

SXSW is still the place to be having conversations about AI, ter Haar added. When Media Monks was at CES in January, he explained, the conversations around AI felt less current than they do now at SXSW.

“The reality is some of the things that we’ve been talking about as ‘the future’ for a while now are actually happening right now,” he said, adding that people at SXSW feel more on top of what’s going on in the AI space.