Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt explains why the AI wave is no bubble, but a new industrial shift

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt does not believe that the AI industry is in the midst of a dot-com-style bubble. In fact, he argues that the current wave marks the beginning of a new industrial era. Since the public rollout of ChatGPT in late 2022, huge investments have been made in AI, with big tech companies rallying behind the technology and portraying it as the next big thing.

However, critics of AI have drawn parallels with the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, and some, such as Torsten Slok, Chief Economist at Apollo Global Management, have warned that today’s top AI stocks are even more overvalued than those in the dot-com era. Apart from Slok, Alibaba Group Chair Joe Tsai has also warned that US AI stocks are in a bubble.

Eric Schmdt on why AI is not a bubble:

Amid rising scepticism around AI, Schmidt — who is also an investor in leading AI companies such as Anthropic and Perplexity — highlights the increasing number of large data centres powered by Nvidia’s chips to demonstrate that the AI industry is not experiencing a bubble.

Speaking at the RAISE summit in Paris, Schmidt said, “So, if if you if you ask most of the executives in the industry, they will say the following. They’ll say that we’re in a period of overbuilding. They’ll say that there will be over capacity in two or three years. And when you ask them, they’ll say, “But I’ll be fine and the other guys are going to lose all their money.” So that’s a classic bubble, right?”

“I personally don’t know. Um, I’ve looked at this pretty hard because you have these massive data centers and Nvidia is quite happy to sell them all the chips, you know, and uh the real estate developers are used to borrowing money to build these things. I’ve never seen a situation where hardware capacity was not taken up by software.”

“So I think it’s it’s unlikely based on my experience that this is a bubble. It’s much more likely that you’re seeing an whole new industrial structure.” Schmidt further noted.