What If AI Is a Bubble?

Radio Atlantic

The Atlantic

Politics, News, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 13 November 2025

⏱️ 26 minutes

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Summary

The money keeps coming. Global spending on artificial intelligence is projected to hit $375 billion this year. In 2026, the figure is supposed to approach half a trillion dollars. The sums invested already are so staggering that the United States is beginning to look like an “Nvidia-state,” where the tech boom is fueling a great majority of economic growth. But lately, tech watchers have started to ask the obvious question: Is this boom in fact a bubble? We talk to the Atlantic staff writer Charlie Warzel about what might happen—to companies, to the economy, to ordinary Americans—if one day that bubble were to burst. Charlie covers tech and all the strange, unmooring things it does to culture. And he has a new Atlantic video podcast called Galaxy Brain launching this week. --- Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Atlantic subscribers also get access to exclusive subscriber audio in Apple Podcasts. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/listener. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The amount of money invested in AI these days is astonishing,
0:10.2	almost unfathomable, like you might even need AI to truly comprehend it.
0:16.0	Recently, Nvidia, which makes chips for pretty much all of the big AI companies,
0:38.6	became the first business ever to be valued at 5 trillion. That's trillion with a T. When I went in to type 5 trillion into my phone calculator just to see what it would look like, because like that's what non-trillionaires do for fun, it couldn't even display the whole number on the screen.
0:40.5	Nvidia is part of an elite group in the tech industry called the Magnificent Seven, seven companies
0:45.6	that make up more than a third of the S&P 500.
0:48.5	That's Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, and Tesla, all of which have made some pretty hefty investments into
0:57.2	AI in the last few years.
0:59.4	Honestly, the amount of money and energy that's being poured into this is staggering.
1:04.5	Global spending is projected to surpass or hit $375 billion this year.
1:10.3	And in 2026, the figure is supposed to go up to close to a half a trillion dollars.
1:17.1	That's Charlie Worsell, who covers tech at the Atlantic and who recently wrote about this topic with our colleague, Mateo Wong.
1:23.7	There's really no way to put in context without sounding ridiculous or super vague just how much money is going into this.
1:33.8	Like we're talking in historic terms.
1:36.3	Back in 2019, a couple of years before OpenAI launched ChatGPT, its CEO, Sam Alt Altman spoke to a group of industry observers.
1:45.6	He was asked how exactly OpenAI plans to make money as a business.
1:49.9	And here's what he said.
1:51.5	You know, the honest answer is we have no idea.
1:53.7	We have never made any revenue.
1:56.0	We have no current plans to make revenue.
1:58.0	We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue.
2:00.0	We have made a soft
	...

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