AI infrastructure boom raises fears of a global financial bubble

Economists, central bankers and industry figures have warned that the surge in investment behind artificial intelligence could be creating a financial bubble with global reach, raising questions about who would bear the losses if spending and valuations retrench. The debate has intensified in recent weeks as heavy capital flows into chips, servers and data centers have outpaced the revenues currently generated by AI services, prompting concern that some projects and companies may be unable to service debt or justify their valuations.

At the center of the debate are massive capital commitments to computing infrastructure. Estimates cited by analysts put annual spending on data centers and related AI infrastructure in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and forecasts stretching into the next decade project trillions more. Critics point to sharply elevated valuations for a handful of firms that dominate AI hardware and cloud services, complex cross‑company financing arrangements and rapid overbuilding of specialized facilities as classic signs of speculative excess. One historian of technology said, "This has not just been a stock market bubble, its been an investment bubble, its...