If the AI Bubble Is Already Bursting, Who Will Truly Survive?
If the AI Bubble is Bursting, Who Will Remain?
The debate over an AI bubble is intensifying, with figures like Ray Dalio warning of high levels and Jensen Huang seeing immense, early-stage opportunity. Both views hold truth: a speculative bubble in capital markets likely exists, mirroring the dot-com era, but the underlying technological shift is real and transformative.
History shows that while bubbles burst—wiping out overvalued companies and speculative capital—they often leave behind critical physical and digital infrastructure. The dot-com bust, for instance, eliminated many firms but left the global fiber optic networks and data centers that enabled the rise of Amazon, Netflix, and cloud computing. Today's massive AI infrastructure investments (projected at trillions by 2030) in data centers, power, cooling, and GPUs may follow a similar path, creating the foundation for future applications.
A key divergence from past bubbles is the "Jevons Paradox" effect in AI. As the cost of AI inference has plummeted by over 99.7% since 2023, enterprise spending on AI has skyrocketed. Cheap "tokens" have unlocked vast, previously uneconomical use cases, moving AI from simple chatbots into core business workflows—code generation, legal document review, scientific simulation, and financial analysis. The market is now in a phase of self-correction, weeding out superficial "API-wrapper" startups, but this cleansing process strengthens the ecosystem.
The long-term trajectory is clear. The value is gradually shifting from capital expenditure (CapEx) on hardware to operational expenditure (OpEx) on transformative applications. As AI becomes a utility, the winners will be firms that deeply integrate it to solve vertical industry problems in law, healthcare, finance, and manufacturing. The泡沫 will recede, but the foundational shift towards an AI-powered era across all sectors is irreversible. The underlying productive force of AI contains no bubble.
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