Jeff Bezos thinks AI technology is in an “industrial bubble.”
On Friday at Italian Tech Week in Turin, Italy, Bezos said that the hype and investment currently defining the sector are bigger than the proven profitability of all of the companies within it, CNBC reported.
“People get very excited, like they are today, about artificial intelligence,” Bezos said at the event.
Related: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Thinks We’re in an AI Bubble Because Investors Are ‘Overexcited’ About Artificial Intelligence
Bezos said that bubbles happen when stock prices are “disconnected” from the core of a business, and become overinflated compared to what’s produced. So valuations rise much higher than what those companies are actually worth. In the infamous dot-com crash in the early 2000s, Internet-based companies attracted investments, despite not making a profit or having viable business plans. When reality set in, the market crashed, leading to significant losses for investors and bankruptcies for many startups.
Bezos explained that during a boom, every experiment or idea ends up getting funded because investors “have a hard time” choosing good ideas over lackluster ones during the excitement.
Still, Bezos said that industrial bubbles are “not nearly as bad” because the underlying technology developed in one can benefit society — even when the bubble bursts. He gave the example of the biotech and pharmaceutical bubble of the 1990s, which resulted in the creation of life-saving medicines, even though some companies went under.
“When the dust settles and you see who the winners [are], societies benefit from those inventions,” Bezos said. “That is what is going to happen here, too. This is real, the benefits to society from AI are going to be gigantic.”
Meanwhile, AI startups are receiving more money now than ever. PitchBook data shows that AI startups raised $104.3 billion in the U.S. in the first half of 2025, almost as much as all startups raised the entire previous year.
Related: Jeff Bezos Sold Billions Worth of Amazon Stock
Bezos isn’t the only tech billionaire cautioning about an AI bubble — OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, whose company was just valued at $500 billion, the highest for any private company ever, said in August at a press dinner that he thinks “investors as a whole are overexcited about AI,” leading to overfunding.
Further, research firm MacroStrategy Partnership claims that the AI bubble is 17 times the size of the dot-com bubble and four times as big as the 2008 real estate one, per MarketWatch.
