On Jan. 2026, the gap between the rich and the have-nots will not be so clear – even in the world of AI.
On the other hand, there is OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Long the hype man for digital superintelligence (also known as AGI), Altman backtracked and said we were in an AI bubble last year. He made unusual deals to feed the money hog known as ChatGPT; Subscriptions do not pay bills. Last week, Altman unveiled what he called the company’s “last resort” in 2024 — selling ads on ChatGPT. A popular LinkedIn post this week used an AI image of Altman out in the cold, calling for change with a funny cardboard sign: “AGI = Ads Generate Revenue.”
And then they have it in the warm rooms of snowy Davos, Switzerland – where the AI economic climate report, from the annual World Economic Forum, is raging.
Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, who rode the company to a value of four billion dollars after the strong growth of the GPU chip that has not slowed down yet, answered the text when asked about the AI bubble. “This is the largest infrastructure construction in human history,” Huang said of the active and promising data center projects. “And so the AI bubble, it comes because the investment is big. And the investment is big, because we have to build the infrastructure needed for all the layers of AI on top of it.”
Huang would not deny it you were there of a bubble, indeed – you just suggested that it was misreading our current economic outlook. Just look at all that infrastructure coming down the pipe! What can’t be said is what those big projects will dry up if AI itself continues to not show a return on investment for mainstream businesses (especially if AI models like DeepSeek can be built with minimal data center usage, the opposite of what makes Nvidia successful).
According to Nvidia, the tail is wagging the dog. And the rest of Davos, the famous confab of billionaires, is being pushed back a bit by consensus.
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“I think there will be big failures, but I don’t think we’re in trouble,” said Larry Fink, CEO of Blackrock, a top technology investment firm. (Blackrock owns more than $200 billion in Nvidia stock.)
And at Davos, the Nobel Prize-winning economist described the current AI phenomenon as a “rational bubble”, likening it to the tulip bulb panic of the 17th century. Why? Because with AI, emphasized Peter Howitt, professor of economics at Brown University, “there is something real there.”
Howitt did not suggest what that real thing was, but insisted that there would be a winner – and their arrival would herald the bursting of the bubble. “At some point, when it becomes less clear who the winners are, the standards of other firms will start to fall, and that’s when the crash will happen.”
So who’s the winner, besides Nvidia and its OpenAI circular deals? Microsoft, with its favorable OpenAI agreement, may be in a position to “win” the AI economy. Microsoft currently owns 27% of the ChatGPT maker. If Altman can’t keep the lights on for long, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella can ride to the rescue and take over OpenAI itself.
Nadella, on the surface, appeared as optimistic about the future of AI as the other titans. And yet in his view, the CEO of Microsoft also sounded a note of alarm. If the AI economy doesn’t focus on non-tech sectors, of course the will be bubble – and soon.
“The real question in front of us is how to make sure that the diffusion of AI happens, and happens quickly,” Nadella said. “For this not to be a bubble by definition, it requires that the benefits of this be distributed evenly.” (Nadella has been criticized by investors for spending too much on AI infrastructure.)
So to summarize the view from the Davos bubble: We are not in an AI bubble, we are in a huge infrastructure investment that will benefit workers. Well, maybe we’re in a logical bubble. But we will be on unreasonable thresh if everyone isn’t entering the AI economy anytime soon, probably by sending poor Sam Altman ad dollars. Did you get that?
