What if OpenAI went belly-up? What Would an AI Crash Look Like? Bloomberg and The Economist
What Would an AI Crash Look Like?
Bubbles are hard to identify and even harder to time, but they aren’t hard to explain.
A new technology or some other catalyst raises investors’ expectations, prices rise, and speculators pile in believing that they can resell the asset to someone else for even more money later.
The key is that a bubble can form even if lots of investors are rational. So long as there are enough investors trading on momentum — or blind optimism — sophisticated traders will find it profitable to ride the bubble rather than to bet against it.
And while bubbles pop, only some set off wider economic and financial crashes like the one the world endured in 2008.
That account comes from A Crash Course on Crises: Macroeconomic Concepts for Run-ups, Collapses, and Recoveries (Princeton University Press, 2023) by Markus Brunnermeier of Princeton and Ricardo Reis of the London School of Economics.
As my colleague Edward Harrison wrote of the AI-heavy S&P 500 in August, “We’re in the unusual situation where fund managers almost uniformly say US stocks are overvalued, yet everyone is piling in.”
Bloomberg 12 October 2025
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-10-12/what-happens-if-the-ai-bubble-bursts
“We will have a crash; I just can’t tell you when, and I can’t tell you how deep.”
Those are the words of financial reporter and author Andrew Ross Sorkin, who offered a warning to investors during an interview aired Sunday on CBS’s “60 Minutes.”
Sorkin has a new book out, “1929,” about the great stock-market crash nearly a century ago.
MarketWatch Oct. 12, 2025 at 8:45 p.m. ET
Sorkin’s greatest accomplishment is allowing us to relive precedent by re-creating how the market felt in 1929, week by week, sometimes day by day, to those experiencing it as its own thing before they knew how it would live on in history.
Crash of 1929 - It was FOMO plus debt. It’s almost always FOMO plus debt
https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2025/09/crash-of-1929-it-was-fomo-plus-debt-its.html
Alla varningsklockor ringer och det är svårt att tro att vi inte befinner oss i en AI-bubbla.
Parallellerna till tidigare finansiella masspsykoser är tydliga. Då talar vi inte bara om dotcom-yran i slutet på nittiotalet som slutade med kraschen efter millennieskiftet.
Även järnvägsboomen i mitten av 1800-talet och elektrifieringen efter förra sekelskiftet ledde till liknande hysterier.
Microchiptillverkaren Nvidia, i skrivande stund värt 44 000 miljarder kronor, värderas nu av börsen till 53 gånger årets vinst.
Det näst största bolaget Microsoft har ett så kallat p/e-tal på 38 och trean Apple har 40.
Schablonmässigt brukar man räkna att ett bolag med ett p/e-tal på 40 ska ha en vinsttillväxt på 40 procent per år, i evig tid, för att betraktas som ”normalvärderat”.
Extremen är Tesla vars p/e-tal är 259, men det hör väl närmast hemma i kuriosa-sektionen.
Men AI-boomen handlar inte bara om dessa sju bolag utan om hela systemet runt den hajpade industrin.
Per Lindvall Fokus 7 oktober 2025
https://www.fokus.se/ekonomi/valkommen-till-ai-bubblan/
What if OpenAI went belly-up?
To gauge the centrality of the AI superstar, we conduct a thought experiment
Look around the world of artificial intelligence and OpenAI is everywhere.
In early September ChatGPT’s creator reportedly struck a deal to buy perhaps $10bn-worth of custom AI chips from Broadcom.
A fortnight later the startup revealed that Nvidia, Broadcom’s larger rival, would invest up to $100bn in it over several years while selling it graphics-processing units (GPUs) worth that amount.
On October 6th OpenAI announced a deal with AMD, a third chipmaker, of similar size and circularity. This time it is OpenAI that may take a stake in AMD, which would sell it silicon worth an estimated $90bn or so between 2026 and 2030.
The Economist 9 October 2025
https://www.economist.com/business/2025/10/09/what-if-openai-went-belly-up
A wave of deals and partnerships are escalating concerns that the trillion-dollar AI boom is being propped up by interconnected business transactions.
Elon Musk’s xAI may be the next AI company to do a creative financing deal involving Nvidia
xAI reportedly is looking to raise $20 billion — with Nvidia as one of the investors
https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2025/10/goldman-one-thing-could-turn-ai-into.html
It was a time of enormous optimism, based mainly on one specific technology - Paul Krugman
Yes, Britain’s Railway Mania of the 1840s was quite a story.
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