AI bubble fears spread as eNCA highlights Wall Street jitters

The eNCA/AFP piece channels a mood that’s increasingly palpable on trading floors: AI has gone from magic word to potential systemic risk. With tech megacaps worth a combined $18 trillion and levering up to finance AI data centers, investors are starting to ask whether this is the dot‑com bubble with GPUs. The article points to Oracle’s worst week since 2001, SpaceX’s $25 billion bond plans, and the specter of “circular financing” where Big Tech funds AI startups who then recycle that cash into cloud and chips from the same giants.([enca.com](https://www.enca.com/business/should-we-fear-ai-bubble-bust))

For the AGI race, a bubble isn’t just about stock charts. If capital markets sour on AI infra, the most compute‑hungry labs could see their cost of capital spike just as their appetite for GPUs peaks. That would favor players with durable cashflow—think hyperscalers and a handful of frontier labs—over thinly capitalized challengers and open‑source hardware efforts. On the other hand, bursts of skepticism can also push management teams to prove real productivity gains instead of chasing vanity benchmarks and speculative moonshots.

What makes this cycle different from past manias is how deeply AI is already embedded in core business operations, from search and ads to logistics. A sharp correction would hurt, but it wouldn’t erase the structural demand for automation, personalization and agentic systems. The likelier outcome is a winnowing: weaker stories get culled, while the firms closest to shipping economically compelling AGI‑adjacent products consolidate power.