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The AI stock market boom has rewritten the rules of Wall Street. Since ChatGPT’s launch in 2022, AI-related stocks have driven roughly 75 percent of the S&P 500’s total returns, with Nvidia's gains accounting for 18 percent just this year. But listen closely to AI evangelists like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and those market gains are less about the value this transformative technology has unleashed and more about a bet on infrastructure spending. "Why don't we just make more GPUs?" economist Tyler Cowen asked him. Altman's answer: "Because we need to make more electrons."
OpenAI is pushing for 100 gigawatts of new U.S. energy capacity annually—the equivalent of building 100 nuclear reactors every year—while it reportedly lost $12 billion in Q3 2025 alone. Yet AI true believers insist the fundamentals are sound, pointing to accelerating revenue and genuine technological breakthroughs. In this edition, CW tracks who's winning and losing in the AI bubble narrative.
Jensen Huang ⬅➡
The CEO of Nvidia, the chipmaker that's become the market's stand-in for the AI boom, beat expectations last month with a record $57 billion in revenues—the stock dropped. This month, Trump let Nvidia sell advanced H200 chips to China—the stock popped. All in all, the shares are significantly down from their late October peak when the company’s market cap touched $5 trillion. At least Huang can joke about the whiplash: "You've got to be worth a lot to lose $500 billion in a few weeks." Internally, though, he told employees in an all-hands meeting that Nvidia's in a "no-win situation"—beat expectations and Wall Street fears an AI bubble, miss them and the bubble is confirmed.
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Kara Swisher ⬇
Rather than take a stand, many of the sharpest voices in tech prefer to dodge the question. Recently, the well-connected podcaster declared: "It's not a bubble necessarily because people are buying it." She then immediately raised concerns about overspending, calling Nvidia "very similar to Cisco" during the dot-com crash, but maybe also like Amazon, which worked out fine eventually. When your analysis covers all possible outcomes, it doesn't say much at all.
Larry Ellison ⬇
In September, Oracle announced a $300 billion deal with OpenAI to provide five years of AI hosting, sending its stock soaring 36 percent—briefly making the founder the world's richest man. But in December, earnings revealed the company raised spending plans by $15 billion and posted negative $10 billion in free cash flow, raising fresh questions about how it will fund the buildout and sending the stock lower than before the OpenAI announcement. AI researcher Gary Marcus called the deal "peak bubble," asking if people promising to build greenhouses for tulip-growers ever "had it so good."
Michael Burry ⬆
The investor who inspired The Big Short is back, placing $1.1 billion in put options against Nvidia and Palantir. He has accused hyperscalers of understating GPU depreciation and artificially inflating their earnings. When he posted cryptic warnings about bubbles on X, the markets initially tanked before recovering. Palantir CEO Alex Karp called him "bats—t crazy." But the last time Wall Street dismissed his bubble warnings, Burry made a fortune betting against subprime mortgages.
Ben Horowitz ⬇
The Andreessen Horowitz co-founder made the counterintuitive argument in The New York Times that "the clearest sign that we are not actually in a bubble is the fact that everyone is talking about a bubble." He worked at dot-com bubble poster-child Netscape, so he should know the most reliable signal of a bubble is when people start trotting out "this time is different" logic.
"Code Red" ⬇
First, Sundar Pichai declared a "Code Red" in 2022 to warn his employees about ChatGPT's existential threat to Google. Then, last month, Sam Altman declared his own "Code Red" at OpenAI when Google's new Gemini 3 got rave reviews. Now the phrase is showing up everywhere, from GOP reactions to election results to restaurant managers dealing with rising beef prices. When tech's crisis language escapes containment and saturates everyday life, that's its own kind of warning.
Originally a staple of Newsweek's print edition, Conventional Wisdom used arrows to track whose stock was rising or falling in the political circus. We're reviving it in the digital age because the problem it lampooned—hyperbole and partisan certainty masquerading as insight—has only intensified.
CW assigns arrows—up, down, or sideways—to the figures and forces shaping current events. The arrows don't predict the future or claim special insight. They capture the prevailing winds of the moment, uncluttered by tribal howling. In an era when partisan media reinforces rather than questions assumptions, CW operates from the center—skeptical of left and right alike, committed to puncturing inflated reputations and recognizing overlooked truths.
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