ai bubble

Six months ago, the AI sector was looking pretty bubbly. Companies were plowing hundreds of billions of dollars, much of it borrowed, into building new data centers, but had no clear path to profitability. Experts and journalists, myself included, were comparing the AI build-out to the railroad bubble of the 1800s and the dot-com bubble of the ’90s, in which speculation led to overinvestment that eventually crashed the stock market. Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman voiced public doubts. “Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI?” he said last year. “My opinion is yes.” T