If the AI Bubble Is Already Bursting, Who Will Truly Remain?
**Summary: If the AI Bubble is Bursting, What Will Remain?**
The debate around an AI bubble is intensifying, with figures like Ray Dalio warning of high valuations while Jensen Huang sees immense opportunity. This echoes the dot-com bubble, which saw massive wealth destruction but ultimately left behind critical infrastructure like undersea cables and broadband, enabling future giants like Amazon and Netflix.
Similarly, today's AI boom involves trillions invested in data centers, power, cooling, and GPUs, while application-layer revenue remains comparatively modest. This investment-disparity signals a bubble. However, the core technological progress is real and accelerating. AI inference costs have plummeted by over 99.7% since 2023, making intelligence increasingly cheap and accessible.
This cost collapse is unlocking vast new demand. Instead of reducing spending, enterprises are tripling their AI cloud expenditure. Cheap "tokens" enable AI to move beyond simple chatbots into complex workflows—automating code writing, legal document review, financial analysis, and scientific research. This follows "Jevons's paradox": improved efficiency leads to greater total consumption.
The market is now undergoing a necessary purification, weeding out "API-wrapper" startups with no real moat. The deeper evolution involves a shift from capital expenditure (CapEx) on infrastructure to operational expenditure (OpEx) on value-creation in applications. While hardware vendors currently profit most, long-term value will migrate to AI-native firms solving vertical industry problems.
Ultimately, a market correction will cleanse speculative excess but will not reverse the AI+ trend. The massive physical and algorithmic infrastructure being built will endure, becoming a cheap, utility-like foundation. Just as the internet became indispensable to all industries post-2000, AI is poised to empower and redefine every sector, moving society irreversibly toward an intelligence-augmented era. The bubble may burst, but the underlying productive momentum is solid.
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