AI Bubble

Two weeks ago, Allbirds was a corpse. On Wednesday, it was an “AI company” — up 582% intraday, peaks near 700%, $127 million in market cap added in a single session. Nothing about the business changed. No GPUs. No customers. No data center. No team. Just a rename: NewBird AI, a $50 million convertible note, and a press release with the magic phrase “low-latency AI compute hardware.” If 2026 needed a tombstone for market rationality, this is it. ...

The $500 billion Stargate project was supposed to be the physical backbone of the AI revolution. Instead, it’s becoming a cautionary tale about what happens when chips evolve faster than concrete can cure. Two Mega-Deals, Two Months, Two Collapses OpenAI and Oracle just scrapped plans to expand their flagship data center in Abilene, Texas. Oracle had already spent billions on hardware, secured land, hired staff, and started construction on a 600-megawatt expansion. Then OpenAI walked. ...

Something shifted this week. Not in the technology — the models keep improving, the benchmarks keep climbing, the agents keep getting sharper. What shifted is the mood. And if you’re watching the AI industry, that mood shift might matter more than any new model release. In the span of a few days: The New York Times asked why the public doesn’t love the AI boom the way they loved dot-com. Bernie Sanders stood at Stanford calling this “the most dangerous moment in the modern history of this country.” Ads quietly appeared inside ChatGPT conversations. And a Bank of America survey showed that a full quarter of fund managers now see the AI bubble as the single largest risk to the market. ...