Are we in an artificial intelligence bubble?
It’s the debate that dominated the tech industry in 2025, and it’s not going away anytime soon.
Record valuations and deals driven by major investments in artificial intelligence have fueled the AI boom, leaving some to brace for the potential burst.
AI leaders like OpenAI and Nvidia have spun an impressive web of staggering deals with cloud infrastructure companies, while hyperscalers including Amazon, Microsoft and Google continue to spend billions on data center buildouts.
Although companies are racing to supply the rapidly accelerating AI demand, the enormous debt financing these buildouts have sparked worry that the spending spree may prove to be an overreach.
Economic bubbles occur when asset prices in a specific market rapidly rise, often due to speculation or overenthusiasm, followed by a crash when prices suddenly drop.
Bubble talks ignited again at the end of last year after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang dismissed fears of a possible AI bust during the company’s third-quarter earnings call.
“There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble,” he said. “From our vantage point, we see something very different.”
Others have been less confident in the stability of the AI surge, including “The Big Short” investor Michael Burry.
The fund manager, who rose to fame 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 Substack essay.
“Sometimes, we see bubbles,” Burry wrote in an October X post. “Sometimes, there is something to do about it. Sometimes, the only winning move is not to play.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made a similar comparison during a dinner with reporters in August.
“Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? My opinion is yes. Is AI the most important thing to happen in a very long time? My opinion is also yes,” he said.
A note on methodology:
CNBC compiled responses from 40 tech executives, analysts and other professionals in the space, who shared their thoughts over the past four months about the current AI frenzy.
Although the question of whether or not the market is in a bubble seems binary, many answers have landed across a spectrum of bubble potential — and worry.
To give each response a more rounded perspective, CNBC also weighed the level of concern.
CNBC scored each person’s remarks on a scale from 0 to 10 on two factors: How much they believe that AI is in a bubble (0 being no and 10 being yes) and how concerned they are about it (0 being not concerned at all and 10 being very concerned).