Year in a word: AI bubble
(noun) theory that tech stocks are priced far above their actual value
Investors and analysts generally use the B-word sparingly. Declaring an important asset class to be in the throes of an unstable speculative frenzy is an easy way to look foolish if you’re wrong — and to generate needless and painful market volatility if you’re right (and influential enough).
In 2025, though — the year ChatGPT hit its third birthday — the term broke confinement. After years of stellar performance in AI-related stocks, even the high priests of Big Tech and Big Finance could see the excesses. Jeff Bezos of Amazon said in October that sure, it’s a bubble, but a “good” one. Sam Altman of ChatGPT parent OpenAI breezily accepted that money could potentially be misallocated. JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon said “a lot of assets out there . . . look like they’re entering bubble territory”.
That does not mean those assets are poised to collapse. The only way to spot a true bubble is when it bursts — that could be years away. It does, however, mean investors need to be on guard. A full-blown crash would hit not just the markets, but potentially the global economy.
Already, markets are eyeing AI with more suspicion. Shares in Meta have declined as investors balk at seemingly unconstrained AI spending. Chips behemoth Nvidia, which became the world’s first $5tn company this year, has declined in value as rivals appear to pose the first serious challenge to its dominance.
Whistling along apparently without care, however, is CEO Jensen Huang. He noted in November that while there has been “a lot of talk” of an AI bubble, “from our vantage point, we see something very different”.
Should that give you comfort? The picks and shovels in this gold rush are his, after all. But once the notion of a bubble sets in, it’s awfully hard to deflate gently.
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From Waterloo to Neural Nets
With pigeons and couriers faster than steam,
He heard of Napoleon’s shattered regime.
The market saw panic, the traders saw doom,
Nathan saw spreadsheets (well… ledgers and gloom).
Fast-forward now—skip the wigs and the quills,
Swap inkpots and ledgers for cloud-server bills.
No pigeons now—just GPUs humming,
While markets still twitch and humans keep guessing.
The war isn’t nations with drums and with flags,
It’s data versus chaos, alpha versus lag.
Transformer on transformer, attention on gains,
Training on patterns of bubbles and pains.
“Will markets go up?” cry the masses in fear.
The AI responds: “Define your time-horizon, dear.”
A crash? A rally? A meme-stock ballet?
The model just shrugs in a Bayesian way.
So the moral remains, though the costumes have changed:
Fortunes favor those calm when the world feels deranged.
From cannon-smoke chaos to silicon brains,
It’s not war or AI—it’s information that reigns.
This isn’t a bubble—it’s a regime change. AI data centres turn creation into infinite scale, while bond markets designed for smokestacks quietly bankroll the information age they barely understand.
The old economic ghosts still roam, but the world has moved on. AI data centres are zero-to-one creations, scalable across time and space—not speculative froth. The real twist is that yesterday’s bond market is financing tomorrow’s information economy, even as it struggles to price it.