OpenAI just secured a casual $500 billion investment — half a trillion dollars, as if someone accidentally leaned on the zero key and forgot to delete a few. Wall Street banks are sprinting into the AI gold rush with the enthusiasm of a toddler let loose in a ball pit. Data centers are sprouting across the country like mushrooms after a warm rain. Every company, CEO, hedge fund, and half of everyone’s extended family is ready to invest in “the future of intelligence,” even if they can’t quite articulate what that future actually is.

So naturally, the question arises:

Is this the biggest bubble humans have ever inflated? My short answer: absolutely.

But here’s the fun twist: that’s not only fine — it’s good. It’s how innovation actually happens.

AI Is a Bubble. So Was Every Major Leap Forward in Human History.

The internet was a bubble.
Railroads were a bubble.
The gold rush was a bubble.
At one point, people were even trying to short the printing press.

Humanity doesn’t adopt transformative technologies with calm, measured restraint. We stampede. We overcorrect. We hyperventilate. We throw absurd amounts of money at ideas that will never work and a smaller but much more important amount of money at ideas that change everything.

Bubbles are not signs of delusion; they're signs that something real is emerging. Real enough to attract speculators, scam artists, visionaries, and institutions all at once.

The chaos is part of the process.

But Let’s Be Honest: A Lot of These Companies Won’t Make It

And this is where the pessimists perk up.

Because yes, the financial picture for many large AI companies looks… shaky. OpenAI is reportedly racing toward revenue, but profitability remains elusive. Google and Meta are pouring billions into training runs that may never directly pay for themselves. Even Microsoft, arguably the most strategically positioned, is eating infrastructure costs like it’s an Olympic sport.

And the AI infrastructure bill?
It’s not small potatoes.
It’s the whole farm.

Between GPUs, energy usage, water consumption, and the arms race for power contracts, the major players are burning through capital at a speed that would make WeWork blush. Data centers don’t come cheap. Neither do chip clusters. Neither do the electric bills required to keep them from melting into a puddle of very expensive goo.

These companies aren’t crying poor, but they aren’t printing money either. And the gap between the hype and the actual financial performance is exactly where bubbles get their lift.

Not everyone survives a bubble. That’s the unwritten rule. The bubble pops, but the technology remains. PalmPilot died; mobile computing didn’t. Pets.com failed; Amazon didn’t. Myspace evaporated; social networks… unfortunately did not.

The question is never “Will companies die?”
The question is “Which ones will be written into the timeline of human progress?”

Meanwhile, Wall Street Is Playing the Role It Always Plays: Overexcited Uncle at Thanksgiving

Wall Street banks are issuing reports with titles like, “AI Will Add $7 Trillion to Global GDP.”
VCs are promising to fund “the Copilot of X” for every imaginable X.
Regional governments are practically begging AI companies to build data centers next to their suburbs.

The excitement isn’t unjustified. AI will rewrite major parts of the global economy. But the money being thrown around is wildly disproportionate to the number of actual, working, revenue-generating AI businesses that currently exist.

This is how bubbles look from the inside.
Everyone feels like they’re late.
Everyone feels like if they wait one more quarter, they’ll miss the opportunity of a lifetime.

And sometimes they’re right.

The Pessimism Isn’t Wrong — Just Incomplete

There are legitimate concerns:

• The financial health of many AI companies is precarious.

• The environmental footprint of training and running models is enormous.

• The arms race for compute is unsustainable in its current form.

• The energy grid was not designed for a world where GPUs outnumber people.

Pessimists are not imagining these issues. They’re real. They’re structural. And they’re not going away.

But focusing only on these risks obscures a more interesting truth: the biggest breakthroughs often emerge because of the excess, not in spite of it.

Your iPhone exists because investors lost billions on mobile computing hype cycles before Apple nailed it.
Modern cloud computing came from decades of overbuilding server capacity.
The big winners of the internet were born from the ashes of dot-com flameouts.

We are living through the same cycle now, at a bigger scale, with higher stakes.

So Where Is This All Going?

Some AI giants will collapse under their own weight.
Some won’t survive a shift in interest rates.
Some will drown in data-center debt.

But several, a small, mighty, world-shifting several, will define the next 50 years of industry, communication, creativity, medicine, logistics, science, and every corner of knowledge work.

The bubble pops.
The technology stays.
History moves on faster than before.

And Where Does This Leave the Teams Who Have to Actually Operate in This Chaos?

Here’s the practical takeaway for people in sales, operations, and proposal work:

While the world is shouting “AI bubble!” procurement teams are doing something much less poetic: rewriting their buying criteria.

When companies start pouring half a trillion dollars into infrastructure, buyers start caring deeply about things like risk, reliability, security, and scale. RFPs begin asking harder questions. Answers need to be more accurate. Compliance suddenly matters again. Your infrastructure description can’t be a copy-paste from 2021.

In bubbles, the winners are the ones who stay grounded while everyone else loses their minds.
And that includes how you respond to RFPs.

Settle exists for exactly this reason: to keep your proposals sane, accurate, consistent, and credible while the rest of the industry panics over GPUs, data centers, and trillion-dollar valuations. AI hype comes and goes; operational excellence has a longer shelf life.

Final Thought

Yes, we’re in a bubble.
A big one.
Maybe the biggest ever.

But bubbles are the scaffolding of progress.
Most companies won’t make it, and that’s normal.
A few will redefine civilization, and that’s exciting.

The question isn’t whether we’re in a bubble.
It’s whether you’re positioned to survive the pop and ride the wave that comes after.