Sam Altman, CEO of
OpenAI and creator of
ChatGPT, stated in 2025 that he believed that an AI bubble is ongoing. In early 2025,
Bridgewater Associates co-
chief investment officer Ray Dalio said that the current levels of investment in AI are "very similar" to the
dot-com bubble. In October of that year,
Jamie Dimon, head of
JP Morgan, the largest bank in the US, said he thinks "AI is real" but said he believes some money invested now will be wasted. He also said there is a higher chance of a meaningful drop in stocks over the following two years than the market was reflecting. Dimon warned that an AI-driven
stock crash could result in a lot of invested money being lost, although he acknowledged that AI "[would] pay off […] just like cars in total paid off, and TVs in total paid off, but most people involved in them didn't do well". However, he further stated on AI that "the level of uncertainty should be higher in most people's minds".
Lack of profitability The values of technology company stocks have been inflated based on AI hype regardless of market fundamentals or the financial reality behind monetizing AI products. A
National Bureau of Economic Research study published in February 2026 found that despite 90% of firms reporting no impact of AI on workplace and productivity, executives projected AI to increase productivity by 1.4% and increase output by 0.8%, leading to comparison with
productivity paradox. OpenAI committed to spending trillion over 8years in building new datacenters, partnering with
Nvidia to deliver 10 gigawatts of
data center computation, with just billion in revenue. This long-term spending is funded by debt. An estimate from Morgan Stanley put global spending on datacenters between 2025 and 2028 at trillion, half of which is covered by private credit. OpenAI has failed to present a reasonable roadmap to profitability or how it will pay for these investments. In November 2025, OpenAI said it expected to report annual losses through 2028, including billion in operating losses in 2028 alone.
The Wall Street Journal obtained financial documents where OpenAI projects significant profits in 2030 despite preceding years of deep losses. Deutsche Bank analyst Jim Reid estimated OpenAI's losses amounting to billion between 2024 and 2029. Aside from its sizable expenditures in data centers, OpenAI has also been incurring rising inference costs as time goes on, making ChatGPT increasingly costly to run when a user submits a prompt. In 2024, they spent billion on inference which rose to billion on inference with
Microsoft Azure in just the first half of 2025. Former
Fidelity manager George Noble said that OpenAI is "burning million per day on
Sora alone." He also highlighted that AI companies will face diminishing returns in model improvements paired with rising costs, saying that "It's going to cost 5x the energy and money to make these models 2x better." OpenAI has been projected to run out of money by mid-2027.
Circular investment depicting circular investments by AI companies became popular in October 2025. Some market analysts have questioned the investment structure of the AI industry due to
profitability and
cash flow issues for major AI companies. Concerns were raised that leading AI tech firms were using circular financing and investment to artificially boost their valuations. In September, Nvidia announced a $100 billion investment into OpenAI, expanding the pre-existing stake that it held in the company. This agreement was made on the expectation that OpenAI would power additional data centres using the GPUs that it had been buying from Nvidia, establishing a circular flow of money. On 9 September 2025, Nvidia entered into an $6.3 billion agreement with AI cloud-computing provider
CoreWeave to purchase the latter's unsold data center capacity through to April 13, 2032. Nvidia held 7% of
CoreWeave shares as at 31 March 2025, and is also supplying GPUs to the company. In October 2025, OpenAI purchased billions of dollars worth of electronics from
AMD, a rival of Nvidia, to supply its development of AI in an agreement that made it one of the largest shareholders in the company. Microsoft also held a large stake in OpenAI, and
Oracle Corporation, a computing company, also entered into a $300 billion deal with the company. The
International Monetary Fund agreed with and reinforced the bank's claims.
Kristalina Georgieva, a Bulgarian economist and the 12th managing director of the IMF, also drew comparisons to the dot-com bubble of 2001, highlighting that a market correction could stunt global growth and weaken the economies of developing countries. Analysts at
Morgan Stanley estimated that debt used to fund data centers could exceed $1 trillion by 2028. Many data center debt bonds are either BBB-rated or
junk-rated bonds.
Dot-com bubble comparisons The AI bubble has drawn comparisons to the dot-com bubble of the 2000s. Billionaire investor
Ray Dalio, who predicted the
2008 financial crisis, warned that the AI bubble echoes the dot-com in the overvaluation of tech stocks amid low interest rates.
Ed Zitron has eschewed direct comparisons to the dot-com bubble, writing that the AI bubble is far larger and more destructive than the dot-com bubble popping was. The underlying asset powering the AI bubble,
GPUs, are much more limited in their costs and utility compared to the dot-com bubble's networking and fiber infrastructure that helped power the internet. In the rot economy, Zitron writes that "Businesses are expected to be - and rewarded for being - eternal burning engines of capital that create more and more shareholder value". Julien Garran, a researcher and partner at MacroStrategy Partnership, published a report in October 2025 that called the AI bubble "the biggest and most dangerous bubble the world has ever seen" that is 17 times larger than the dot-com bubble. == Opposing views ==