The AI bubble debate: 16 business leaders, from Sam Altman to Bill Gates to Mark Cuban, weigh in

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that the AI market is in a bubble.

"When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth," Altman recently told reporters, per The Verge.

Altman said this describes the state of play.

"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.

Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates says AI is in a bubble — just not to the extent of Danish tulips.

"The value is extremely high, just like creating the internet ended up being, in net, very valuable," Gates told CNBC in late October. "But you have a frenzy. And some of these companies will be glad they spent all this money. Some of them, you know, they'll commit to data centers whose electricity is too expensive."

Gates said that the situation reminds him of dot-com bubble when overvalued internet companies sparked a crash.

"Absolutely, there are a ton of these investments that will be dead ends," he said.

Still, the billionaire said that AI remains a major breakthrough, calling it "the biggest technical thing ever in my lifetime."

Mark Cuban, who famously sold Broadcast.com just before the dot-com bubble burst, said he doesn't see similarities to the current situation.

"There were people creating companies with just a website and going public. That's a bubble where there's no intrinsic value at all," Cuban told podcaster Lex Fridman in 2024. '"People aren't even trying to make operating cap profits, they're just trying to leverage the frothiness of the stock market, that's a bubble. You don't see that right now. "

Cuban took particular notice of the quality of AI companies going public.

"We're not seeing funky AI companies just go public," he said. "If all of a sudden we see a rush of companies who are skins on other people's models or just creating models to create models that are going public, then yeah, that's probably the start of a bubble."

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said AI could become a bubble, but there will only be a crash if companies fail to keep making advancements.

"If the models keep on growing in capability year-over-year and demand keeps growing, then maybe there is no collapse," Zuckerberg told the "Access" podcast in September.

Zuckerberg said there are risks that the AI boom becomes like the dot-com bubble.

"There's definitely a possibility, at least empirically, based on past large infrastructure buildouts and how they led to bubbles, that something like that would happen here."

For Meta, Zuckerberg said the real risk is not spending enough.

"The risk, at least for a company like Meta, is probably in not being aggressive enough rather than being somewhat too aggressive," he said.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang doesn't see a bubble.

"I don't believe we're in an AI bubble," Huang told Bloomberg TV.

Huang said that instead of overspeculation, AI is part of a transition from an old way of computing.

"We're going through a natural transition from an old computing model based on general purpose computing to accelerated computing," he said. "We also know that AI has become good enough because of reasoning capability, and research capability, its ability to think — it's now generating tokens and intelligence that is worth paying for."

Nvidia is skyrocketing amid AI-fueled hope. In late October, the chipmaker became the world's first $5 trillion market cap company.

Huang said Nvidia is happy to pay for AI for its employees, name-checking Cursor, an AI coding agent, as one of many services for which his company pays.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said there is some "irrationality" in the AI boom. He also cautioned that if a bubble were to burst, its blast radius would extend across the private sector.

"I think no company is going to be immune, including us," Pichai told the BBC in November.

Comparing the current moment to the Dotcom era, Pichai said that sometimes investment cycles can "overshoot."

"I expect AI to be the same," he said. "So I think it's both rational and there are elements of irrationality through a moment like this."

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble, but not in the way everyone might think.

Bezos called the current situation an "industrial bubble." The world's third-richest person said there are similarities now, including the frenzy of investments.

"The good ideas and the bad ideas. And investors have a hard time in the middle of this excitement, distinguishing between the good ideas and the bad ideas," he said in October during a conference in Italy. "And that's also probably happening today."

Bezos said that hoopla shouldn't overshadow the reality that "AI is real" and will change society.

"The [bubbles] that are industrial are not nearly as bad," Bezos said. "It can even be good, because when the dust settles and you see who are the winners. Societies benefit from those inventions."

JPMorgan Vice Chairman Daniel Pinto said he sees a correction coming.

"There is probably a correction there," Pinto said at a Bloomberg event in November.

Pinto said the market is pushing valuations beyond current justifications.

"In order to justify these valuations, you are considering a level of productivity that, it will happen, but it may not happen as fast as the market is pricing now," he said.

Like Altman, OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor says we're in an AI bubble.

"I think it is both true that AI will transform the economy, and I think it will, like the internet, create huge amounts of economic value in the future," Taylor told The Verge in September. "I think we're also in a bubble, and a lot of people will lose a lot of money."

Taylor, who is also CEO of Sierra, also sees some similarities to the dot-com bubble. He also said that some of the internet companies that failed in the 90s were just ahead of their time.

"Even things like Webvan, there's now, as the internet became more distributed, really healthy businesses like Instacart and DoorDash and others that were built now that the smartphone and the scale of the internet has matured," he said. "So even some of the specific ideas were actually not that bad, but maybe a little early."

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said just because it looks like a bubble doesn't mean that it is.

"I think it's unlikely, based on my experience, that this is a bubble," Schmidt said in July during an appearance at the RAISE Summit in Paris. "It's much more likely that you're seeing a whole new industrial structure."

Schmidt said it takes solace in where the hardware and chips markets stand.

"You have these massive data centers, and Nvidia is quite happy to sell them all the chips," he said. "I've never seen a situation where hardware capacity was not taken up by software."

Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger says AI is in a bubble, but it won't pop for "several years."

"Are we in an AI bubble? Of course. Of course we are," Gelsinger told CNBC in October. "I mean, we're hyped. We're accelerating. We're putting enormous leverage into the system."

Gelsinger said that businesses are just beginning to reap the benefits of AI.

"As Jensen (Huang) talked about, and I agree with this, you know that businesses are yet to really start materially benefiting from it," he said. "We're displacing all of the internet and the service provider industry as we think about it today — we have a long way to go."

Alibaba cofounder Joe Tsai has voiced concerns about the scramble for data centers needed to help power the next generation of AI models.

"I start to see the beginning of some kind of bubble," Tsai told the HSBC Global Investment Summit in March, Bloomberg News reported.

Tsai said he's worried the building rush might outpace demand.

"I start to get worried when people are building data centers on spec," he said. "There are a number of people coming up, funds coming out, to raise billions or millions of capital."

Hedge fund icon Ray Dalio voiced concerns about a bubble earlier this year, when DeepSeek's rollout led analysts to rethink AI's outlook.

"Where we are in the cycle right now is very similar to where we were between 1998 or 1999," Dalio told the Financial Times in January. "There's a major new technology that certainly will change the world and be successful. But some people are confusing that with the investments being successful."

At the time, Dalio cited high stock prices and high interest rates. The good news is that Wall Street widely expects the Federal Reserve to cut rates during its September meeting.

Billionaire tech CEO Thomas Siebel said there is "absolutely" an AI bubble and that it's "huge."

"So we have this similar thing going on with generative AI that we've seen with previous technologies," Siebel told Fortune in January. "The market is way, way overvaluing."

Siebel, who leads C3.ai, singled out OpenAI in terms of overevaluations.

"If it disappeared, it wouldn't make any difference in the world," he said. "Nothing would change. I mean, nobody's life would change. No company would change. Microsoft would find something else to power Copilot. There's like 10 other products available that would do it equally as good."

AMD CEO Lisa Su says the bubble talk "is completely wrong."

"For those who are talking about a 'bubble,' I think they're being too narrow in their thinking of, what is the return on investment today or over the next six months," Su told Time Magazine in 2024. "I think you have to look at this technology arc for AI over the next five years, and how does it fundamentally change everything that we do? And I really believe that AI has that potential."

Nicolai Tangen, who runs the world's biggest sovereign wealth fund, said if AI is a bubble, "it may not be such a bad bubble."

Speaking to the Financial Times in November, the CEO of Norway's $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund said that AI is a "pretty hot space" right now, fueled by hype and a wave of capital. As the technology marks a sweeping societal shift, traditional valuations can be difficult to determine.

Tangen said overvaluation isn't entirely negative. The sheer volume of capital rushing into AI will ultimately fund technologies that boost long-term productivity — from automation to data processing to new types of AI models.

The hard part for investors is telling real breakthroughs apart from noise in a landscape still dominated by a few powerful platform companies, he added.