Are we in an artificial intelligence bubble?
This is the debate that dominated the tech industry in 2025, and it’s not going away anytime soon.
Record valuations and deals driven by massive investments in artificial intelligence are fueling an AI boom, and some are bracing for a potential explosion.
OpenAI and Nvidia While weaving an impressive web of incredible deals with cloud infrastructure companies, hyperscalers such as Amazon, microsoft and google We continue to spend billions of dollars to expand our data centers.
As companies scramble to keep up with rapidly accelerating demand for AI, the massive debt to fund these increases has raised concerns that this spending could prove to be excessive.
Economic bubbles occur when asset prices in a particular market rise rapidly, often due to speculation or overexuberance, followed by a crash in which prices suddenly fall.
Bubble talks reignited late last year after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang dismissed concerns about the possibility of AI failure during the company’s third-quarter earnings conference.
“There’s a lot of talk about an AI bubble,” he says. “From our perspective, we see something completely different.”
Some, including Big Short investor Michael Varley, are less confident in the stability of the AI surge.
The fund manager, who became famous for predicting the 2008 housing crisis, drew parallels between the current spending euphoria and the dot-com mania of the late 1990s in a lengthy essay for Substack.
“Sometimes bubbles may appear,” Barry wrote in an Oct. 10 post. “Sometimes you can do something about it. Sometimes the only way to win is not to play.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made a similar comparison at a dinner with reporters in August.
“Are we at a stage where investors as a whole are getting too excited about AI? My opinion is yes. Is AI the most important thing that’s going to happen for a very long time? My opinion is also yes.”
Notes on methodology:
CNBC compiled responses from 40 technology executives, analysts, and other subject matter experts who shared their thoughts on the current AI craze over the past four months.
The question of whether the market is in a bubble seems binary, but many answers span the spectrum of bubble possibility and concern.
To give a more comprehensive view of each response, CNBC also weighed the level of concern.
CNBC graded everyone’s statements on a scale of 0 to 10 on two factors: how much they believe AI is in a bubble (0 = no, 10 = yes) and how concerned they are about it (0 = not at all concerned, 10 = very concerned).
