Is the AI boom actually a bubble? Here’s what the biggest names in business are saying

Silicon Valley has never built faster, louder, or more expensively than it is right now. Every few weeks seems to bring another promise of the century: a new chip, a new cluster, a new frontier of artificial intelligence that will supposedly rewrite the rules of work, creativity, and capitalism itself. The world’s biggest companies are treating compute power the way past generations treated oil — as the indispensable fuel of progress. Electricity, land, and GPUs have become the new holy trinity of ambition.

AI’s numbers read like a mania in motion. Global AI spending is expected to top $1 trillion by 2030, according to IDC. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Oracle, and Meta are together burning through more than $200 billion in annual capital expenditures. Entire power grids are being rewritten to accommodate AI demand; entire countries are rethinking industrial policy around it.

And yet, behind the bravado, a familiar unease has returned. Investors whisper about dot-com déjà vu — valuations that defy physics, a scramble for scarce inputs, and a growing suspicion that the supply chain is running ahead of the business case. For every company announcing a 100-megawatt data park, another might quietly admit that customer adoption is lagging expectations. Everyone knows there’s gold in the hills — they just don’t know how much, or who gets paid first.

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Bubble-or-boom tension is now defining the industry. Some of the loudest voices in AI call talk of a bubble naïve, insisting the demand is real, the infrastructure is permanent, and the upside is barely priced in. Others — including the very people building the boom — acknowledge that the exuberance is already outpacing reality. Between the prophets and the pragmatists lies a rare moment of candor: an industry trying to convince itself that, this time, history won’t rhyme.

The question isn’t whether AI changes everything — it’s whether the economics of that change can keep up with the marketing. The last great bubble gave the world broadband, smartphones, and trillion-dollar platforms. This one is producing terawatt contracts and GPU shortages. Whether it also will produce a reckoning depends on who you ask. From chipmakers to cloud giants, the world’s most powerful executives are now split on a trillion-dollar question: Is AI the new industrial revolution — or the next speculative fever dream?

Sam Altman — CEO, OpenAI

“Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? My opinion is yes,” Altman said in mid-August, adding that, “When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth.” OpenAI has a $500 billion valuation, so Altman can admit he’s surfing a bubble while still raising its tide.

Jensen Huang— founder & CEO, Nvidia

No one benefits more from AI enthusiasm than Huang, and perhaps no one sounds less worried about it. “This year, particularly the last six months, demand of computing has gone up substantially,” he recently told CNBC.

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Lisa Su — CEO, AMD

Critics, Su recently told Yahoo Finance after AMD’s OpenAI partnership, are “thinking too small.” That conviction has become AMD’s corporate mood: pragmatic swagger. “You have to really look at what the power of this technology can do for the world,” she said, adding that she thinks this is the start of a “10-year… supercycle” rather than late-stage froth.

Mark Zuckerberg — founder & CEO, Meta

Zuckerberg has flirted with both sides of the argument. “An AI bubble is quite possible,” he said — before immediately adding that the greater risk is underinvesting. “If we end up misspending a couple of hundred billion dollars,” he said, “the greater risk is on the other side.” Meta is pouring billions into models, devices, and data centers, accepting volatility as the entry fee for the next platform shift.

Jeff Bezos — founder, Amazon

At Italian Tech Week earlier this month, Bezos called the current boom “a kind of industrial bubble,” then added, “the ones that are industrial are not nearly as bad — they can even be good,” explaining that speculative eras sometimes leave durable legacies. “Investors have a hard time … distinguishing between the good ideas and the bad ideas,” he said, but argued that “AI is real, and it is going to change every industry.” The benefits, he added, “are going to be gigantic.” And when “the dust settles and you see who are the winners — society benefits from those inventions.”

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Jamie Dimon — chairman & CEO, JPMorgan Chase

Dimon’s version of caution sounds like foreboding. He’s said he’s “more worried than others” about how investors are treating AI valuations, warning that too much cheap capital has chased too few defensible ideas. In a BBC interview last week, Dimon said “AI is real… [and] will pay off,” but warned that some of the money pouring in “will probably be lost.” JPMorgan is investing heavily in machine-learning tools. But he’s wary of moral hazard — of an economy betting on productivity gains that haven’t yet materialized.

Michael Dell — founder & CEO, Dell Technologies

Dell’s tone is pragmatic, somewhere between optimism and fatigue. He says he doesn’t see a bubble — not yet. Demand for compute, he argues, is real and compounding — “very solid,” he said — though he concedes the data-center rush could eventually hit a too-many-built point. “I’m sure at some point there’ll be too many of these things built, but we don’t see any signs of that," he said.

Pat Gelsinger — former CEO, Intel

“Of course… we’re in an AI bubble,” Gelsinger told CNBC in October, before quickly adding that he doesn’t expect it to pop for “several years.” Having watched the dot-com frenzy from inside Intel’s glass towers two decades ago, Gelsinger knows what speculative euphoria feels like. But this time, he said, the leverage is industrial, not digital: “We’re hyped, we’re accelerating, we’re putting enormous leverage into the system.”

David Solomon — chairman & CEO, Goldman Sachs

Solomon is sounding the alarm from Wall Street’s corner office. He warned recently that vast sums are being deployed into AI projects and that “there was a lot of capital that got invested that didn’t deliver returns,” drawing parallels to the late-’90s tech run-up. He told clients, “I wouldn't be surprised if in the next 12 to 24 months we see a drawdown with respect to equity markets,” he said. “But that shouldn’t be surprising given the run we’ve had.”

Arvind Krishna — CEO, IBM

Krishna is resisting the “boom-and-bust” framing. “If you look at it as part of a 10-year horizon, you’re going to be shocked,” he said during a recent Q&A session at the XChange Best of Breed Conference. “Because it’s going to be bigger than the biggest aspirations of today.” IBM has been through its share of hype cycles, and Krishna’s betting that steady integration, not fireworks, will win. While he thinks people will be “somewhat underwhelmed” by AI’s impact over the next two or three years, he thinks that “this is going to be another 10X revolution in productivity, but that is going to take a couple of decades to play out.”

Safra Catz — CEO, Oracle

Few executives sound less conflicted about the AI boom than Oracle’s top brass. On the company’s latest earnings call, Catz rattled off “four multibillion-dollar contracts with three different customers” and a backlog up “359% to $455 billion,” with more on the way. “Over the next few months, we expect to sign-up several additional multibillion-dollar customers and RPO is likely to exceed half-a-trillion dollars.” Even if this is a bubble, Oracle’s plan is simple right now: meter it and bill it.

Larry Fink — chairman & CEO, BlackRock

When Fink says something isn’t a bubble, it might just land with the weight of $13 trillion. “I don’t believe this is a bubble,” he recently told CNBC, adding that the money pouring into AI is “capital that in most cases is going to be well spent.” He sees the wave as capitalism doing what it does best: “We’re going to have some big winners and we’re going to have some big losers … but if you have a diversified portfolio, you’re going to be fine.” The BlackRock chief even gave a nod to the builders — Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, Oracle, Broadcom — arguing that America’s corporate muscle is “spending this money to win on a geopolitical basis.” The man who allocates the world’s money is betting that the boom is the plan.

Warren Buffett — chairperson, Berkshire Hathaway

At Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting last year, Buffett compared AI with “letting a genie out of the bottle” and admitted that “the power of the genie scares the hell out of me.” Buffett’s worry isn’t that AI won’t work; it’s that it’ll work too well for too few, too fast, before anyone remembers to ask how it’s priced. Coming from a man who treats earnings as religion and hype as heresy, the comment landed less as a quip and more as a quiet sermon.

Rajiv Jain — chairman and CIO, GQG Partners

Veteran stock-picker Jain said he sees the pattern too clearly for comfort. “There is much brazenness in this circularity,” he said recently, describing AI companies funding infrastructure that, in turn, props up their own valuations. “This is turning financing cash flows into revenue and artificially creating revenue and profits — identical to Cisco, Lucent, or Global Crossing of 1999.” Jain isn’t betting on collapse so much as fatigue: “You don’t have [real] moats, network effects, or switching costs,” he said. “You don’t have this differentiation currently, so it’s easy to switch, which makes these models ultimately a commodity that should at best earn marginal profits.” The unwind, he warned, “will likely be very painful.”