Washington Post asks if AI boom is a bubble headed for a crash

The Washington Post piece crystallizes a growing unease: AI is no longer just a tech story but a macro‑risk story. When Nvidia is worth more than many national stock markets and Meta is financing $30 billion data centers off‑balance‑sheet, AI capex is clearly bleeding into broader credit markets. The experts quoted argue we’re entering a classic "red zone" where rapid simultaneous growth in sector lending and valuations often precedes crises. If that’s right, the next downturn could be triggered not by subprime mortgages but by over‑built GPU barns and under‑performing AI projects.

For the race to AGI, a bust wouldn’t stop research, but it could reshape who controls the frontier. A sharp correction might leave only the best‑capitalized hyperscalers and a handful of labs standing, further concentrating power. Alternatively, it could force a pivot from brute‑force scaling to more sample‑ and compute‑efficient research if capital markets punish trillion‑dollar capex plans without clear ROI. Either way, the macro context matters: AGI timelines are partly a function of how long society tolerates enormous up‑front spending on speculative capabilities.

The article also hints at a political risk: if retail investors get burned chasing AI stocks through zero‑commission apps, populist backlash against "AI elites" could spill over into heavy‑handed regulation. That could slow deployment or redirect public funding away from frontier efforts toward more prosaic digital infrastructure.