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For the past three years, the AI boom has defined the global economy’s new religion — a belief system fueled by hype, GPU shortages, trillion-dollar market caps, and a techno-utopian promise that machines will eventually do everything humans can do (and more).

But over the past few weeks, that belief has started to crack. Wall Street analysts are quietly warning of a bubble. Investors are suddenly jittery. Policymakers are raising questions they should have asked years ago.

And yet Silicon Valley refuses to pump the brakes. Instead, it is spending even more — tens, hundreds, even trillions of dollars — building the digital equivalent of moon bases for a future that may or may not ever arrive.

The script from The Daily lays out something profound, and profoundly paradoxical:
The louder Wall Street whispers “bubble,” the harder Silicon Valley steps on the gas.

This editorial examines why.

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1. The Moment the Hype Collided With Reality

Three years after the release of ChatGPT, the AI boom has matured from a fever dream into something real and tangible.

AI transcribes meetings. Summarizes legal documents. Codes basic functions. Drafts emails. Generates images. Detects molecules in drug discovery. It is unquestionably transformative.

But there’s a difference between
👉 transformative
and
👉 world-replacing.

The Valley, however, believes the latter. And that belief now demands an almost absurd level of investment.

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2. The $500 Billion Question: Why Are They Spending So Much?

OpenAI alone expects to spend $500 billion on U.S.-based data centers.

Let’s put that in perspective:

• Enough to fund 15 Manhattan Projects.
• Enough to run the Apollo program twice.
• And that’s one startup.

Globally, the projected spend on AI data centers is approaching $3 trillion.

If this feels like bubble math, it’s because it is.

But tech CEOs don’t see it that way.

To them, this is not waste.
It’s pre-payment for a future where Artificial General Intelligence — machines doing all economically valuable work — becomes reality.

This is the core justification:

“Even if it’s expensive, the payoff is infinite if we get there first.”

That logic underpins everything.

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3. AGI: The Most Powerful Motivator Silicon Valley Has Ever Seen

AGI has become the Valley’s moonshot, religion, and economic engine all at once.

Define it however you want —
• machines that think like humans
• machines that can perform any job
• the last invention humanity ever needs to build

To tech leaders, AGI justifies any risk.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg claims most of Meta’s AI code will soon be written by AI.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang predicts everyone will have a “superhuman AI tutor.”
Sam Altman dares critics to short OpenAI so he can “watch them get burned.”

This is the psychology that drives trillion-dollar commitments.

It’s not belief.
It’s faith.

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4. If The Future Is So Uncertain, Why Double Down?

One word explains everything:

FOMO.

Fear of missing out is not an internet meme — it is an economic force.

In Silicon Valley, the cardinal sin is not losing money.
It’s missing the next platform shift.

• Microsoft missed mobile → they will never miss another platform again.
• Google missed social → AI is an existential defense.
• Meta missed the privacy wave → AI is a lifeline.
• Amazon depends on AWS → AI is the next cloud.

To abstain from the AI race is to commit corporate suicide.

And there’s one more brutal truth:

**Data centers take years to build.

If you don’t start now, you’ll be irrelevant by the time the next model arrives.**

This forces companies into a paradox:
Even if the technology is not ready, the infrastructure must be built as if it is.

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5. The Dot-Com Parallels: What Silicon Valley Remembers vs. What It Ignores

The script draws a clear parallel to the dot-com bubble.

What people remember:

• Pets.com
• Cosmo
• Hundreds of startups with no revenue
• A spectacular crash

What Silicon Valley remembers:

• The infrastructure survived
• Fiber-optic cables laid during the bubble powered the next 20 years
• Amazon and Google emerged stronger
• The internet did, ultimately, change everything

The lesson executives cling to is:

“Even if a bubble bursts, the technology still wins in the long run.”

This selective memory is why they keep spending.

But there is something different this time.

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6. Why This Bubble Is Much Riskier Than the Last One

The dot-com bubble burned through venture capital.
The AI bubble is burning through debt.

And that changes everything.

While giants like Microsoft and Google can pay cash, many key infrastructure players can’t.

Smaller firms —
• CoreWeave
• Lambda
• Nebius

— are borrowing billions to build AI supercluster data centers.

One example is stunning:

For every $5 billion CoreWeave builds, it takes on $3 billion in debt.

If AI revenue materializes?
No problem.

If it doesn’t?
We are looking at something far closer to the 2008 mortgage crisis than the 2000 dot-com crash.

Here’s why:

1. The debt is enormous — estimated at $1 trillion globally.

2. The debt is opaque — much of it is held by private credit firms.

3. The debt is securitized — chopped up into asset-backed securities.

Sound familiar?
It should.

It’s the same architecture that blew up the housing market.

And unlike the dot-com era, these data centers are ungodly expensive.
A failed AI data center is not a failed startup.
It is a billion-dollar crater.

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7. The Scenario Nobody Talks About: What If Only One Company “Lands on the Moon”?

Even if AGI is possible, the winners will be few.

Maybe one.
Maybe two.

The losers?
Everyone else.

Imagine a world where:

• OpenAI lands on the moon
• Google gets close
• Meta is left behind
• Amazon over-builds
• Oracle drowns in debt
• CoreWeave collapses like Lehman Brothers

This is not a sci-fi scenario.
It is a plausible economic outcome.

Silicon Valley is betting on a moon landing.
But we may end up with a graveyard of unfinished rockets.

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8. The Human Paradox: The Future Tech Wants Is Not the Future Workers Want

There is something deeply ironic about the AI race.

The worst-case scenario for Silicon Valley is that AGI takes a very long time or never arrives.

But for millions of human workers?
That’s the best-case scenario.

Nobody wants a future where:

• most jobs disappear
• economic value is concentrated in a handful of companies
• humans become optional

And yet this is the future most AI leaders openly embrace.

The script’s most powerful observation is that:

The future Silicon Valley wants may not be the future people want.

If AGI stalls, we gain time to answer the real questions:

• What will happen to labor?
• How do we regulate AGI?
• Who owns the models?
• Will AI be public infrastructure?
• How do we avoid catastrophic concentration of power?

A slowdown is not failure.
It is breathing room.

And humanity might need that breathing room more than Silicon Valley admits.

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9. Nvidia’s Stunning Earnings: Relief or Delusion?

Just as Wall Street began panicking, Nvidia released blockbuster earnings:

• $31.9 billion profit in one quarter
• Record sales
• 65% growth year-over-year

This temporarily soothed fears.

But Nvidia’s success doesn’t answer the deeper question:

What happens when demand for AI compute eventually plateaus?

You can’t build infinite data centers.
You can’t chain the economy to GPU growth forever.
You can’t borrow trillions without consequence.

AI may be revolutionary.
But revolutions have cycles.

And this cycle is already showing signs of strain.

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10. The Real Bubble: Not AI. Not Models. It’s the Assumption of Infinite Growth.

The biggest bubble is the belief that:

👉 AI will grow indefinitely, exponentially, and linearly pay off all debt and investment forever.

History says that no technology grows like that:

• The internet plateaued
• Smartphones plateaued
• Cloud plateaued
• Social media plateaued

Every technological S-curve eventually flattens.

But the AI boom has priced in a future with no ceilings — only vertical lines.

That fantasy is the bubble.

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11. What Comes Next? Three Possible Futures

Future A: We land on the moon

AGI arrives.
The early investors become the richest institutions in history.
The bet pays off.

Future B: The bubble pops softly

Huge losses.
Some bankruptcies.
Infrastructure remains and becomes useful later.
The world moves on.

This mirrors the dot-com era.

Future C: The bubble pops violently

Debt contagion spreads.
A major AI infrastructure company collapses.
Markets seize.
A 2008-style crisis — but triggered by data centers, not mortgages.

No expert can say which future we are headed toward.

That, in itself, is the risk.

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12. Conclusion: The Race for AGI Is a Gamble With No Referee

Silicon Valley is attempting something unprecedented:

• building trillion-dollar infrastructure
• chasing a technology it doesn’t know how to build
• borrowing money it may never repay
• shaping a future billions of people never asked for

The AI boom is not just an innovation cycle.
It is a philosophical bet on what the future of work — and humanity — should look like.

The dot-com era gave birth to the modern internet.
The AI era will give birth to something even bigger.

But whether that future is utopian or catastrophic depends on forces we are only beginning to understand.

Until then, Silicon Valley will keep spending.
And Wall Street will keep worrying.

Because every era has its bubble.
This one is just larger, louder, and more consequential than anything before.

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