The inflated value of AI companies. An October 2025 article in The New York Times claimed that by one estimate, 80% of the increase in the stock market for the year was due to AI companies. By then, the stock market had more than thirty record highs.
Boom or Bust?
While many argue that AI is the most significant technical invention in history, others claim that AI companies are not yet making anywhere near the money to justify spending hundreds of billions collectively on datacenter infrastructure. Within two or three years, a trillion dollars might be required, and it could take a decade or more to actually make a significant return on the investments.
Dot-Com Bubble Again?
The rise of the stock market in the 1990s was due to the explosion of the Web and the huge investment in Internet companies. When the bubble burst, it caused the Nasdaq to lose more than 75% of its value, and it took more than a decade and a half to completely recover from the losses (see
dot-com bubble).