NVDIA BULLS! DON'T FART TOO LOUDLY. IT'S TOO STUFFYhe AI boom is reaching the sort of lofty heights that characterised history’s great bubbles, from the Dutch tulip mania to the dotcom bust at the turn of the millennium. Investors have now determined that Nvidia alone is worth more than the entire annual output of Spain. Add in the tech companies expected to profit most from the AI revolution — Nvidia along with Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Meta, Tesla, and Microsoft — and the so-called Magnificent Seven are together valued at more than the stock markets of every other country on the planet. The American stock market’s spectacular performance over the last year, up more than a fifth, has been driven almost entirely by these seven companies.
We’ve been here before, many times. New technologies often produce bubbles — railways in the 19th century, automobiles and radios in the 1920s, the internet in the 1990s and now the AI boom, which was triggered by Open AI’s launch of ChatGPT late in 2022. Driving any bubble is the same conviction that the new technology will revolutionise the economy, combined with the fact that nobody can be sure just how it will do that. So narratives of transformation become self-sustaining, as the stock’s rise draws in ever more investors eager to join the ride, creating a self-propelling upward cycle.
In time, all bubbles burst, earlier or later.
