Could AI Bubble Burst Soon? Experts Warn As Fears Grow About Technology

Days after Amazon boss Jeff Bezos referred to the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) technology as an 'industrial bubble', OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has offered his perspective on the matter. During OpenAI's DevDay last week, Altman fielded questions from the press, a rarity these days, where he said certain parts of AI technology were indeed 'bubbly'.

"I know it's tempting to write the bubble story. In fact, there are many parts of AI that I think are kind of bubbly right now," Altman was quoted as saying by BBC.

The term bubble describes a market phase where speculative buying drives up the value of assets, such as company stock, to levels that far exceed their worth. This unsustainable growth inevitably ends with the bubble bursting, as it happened during the dot-com crash in 2000, when inflated internet company valuations collapsed.

Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan, recently joined the growing list of global institutions that have warned about the AI bubble hitting the global equity markets.

Dimon said it was possible that some of the investors will lose money, and he is "far more worried about that than others".

Marshalled by Altman, OpenAI is now the world's most valuable startup with a market valuation of $500 billion, but it is far from turning profitable any time soon. In fact, experts have warned that the soaring valuations of AI companies might be a result of 'financial engineering'.

For example, OpenAI has signed deals with chipmaker Nvidia, the world's most valuable publicly traded company, and its rival AMD, and a $300 billion deal with tech giant Oracle for the buildout of future data centres. Then there's tech giant Microsoft, which is heavily invested in OpenAI as well. Together, this complex financing arrangement may be clouding perceptions of the AI demand, experts warn.

"We're creating a new man-made ecological disaster: enormous data centres in remote places like deserts, that will be rusting away and leaching bad things into the environment, with no one left to hold accountable because the builders and investors will be long gone," Jerry Kaplan, who founded Go Corporation, which developed early tablet computers told BBC.

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What Did Bezos Say?

Speaking at the Italian Tech Week 2025 in Turin, Italy, Bezos said there is an 'industrial bubble' with AI having the power to change every industry.

"This is kind of an industrial bubble as opposed to financial bubbles," said Bezos, who also explained the difference between an industrial and banking bubble.

"The banking bubble, the crisis in the banking system, that's just bad, that's like 2008. Those bubbles society wants to avoid. The ones that are industrial are not nearly as bad, they can even be good. Because when the dust settles and you see who are the winners society benefits from those inventions," he said.