Overview
- Financial Times calculations show ten private AI companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Databricks and Figure AI, added nearly $1 trillion in valuation over the past year as U.S. VCs funneled about $161 billion into the sector, largely concentrated in a few names.
- Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon likened the AI boom to the dot‑com era, Citigroup CFO Mark Mason said some areas are likely overvalued, and Goldman COO John Waldron warned the U.S. economy may be “betting too hard” on the technology.
- Despite the caution, banks continue deploying AI internally, with JPMorgan’s Troy Rohrbaugh citing cost and process gains and Morgan Stanley CFO Sharon Yeshaya saying the industry is only scratching the surface of the technology’s potential.
- Market observers flag contagion risk to public equities after NVIDIA, AMD, Broadcom and Oracle rallied on recent compute deals with OpenAI, with warnings that gains could reverse if questions about the startup’s ability to pay persist.
- Supporters of the surge argue speculative capital can accelerate durable winners, with General Catalyst’s Hemant Taneja calling the bubble productive, Salesforce’s Marc Benioff expecting many failures but outsized value creation, and Coatue’s Lucas Swisher comparing the moment to Internet 1.0; OpenAI’s annualized revenue is reported at about $13 billion three years after ChatGPT’s launch.