The AI industry has grown accustomed to its own momentum: soaring valuations, billion-dollar partnerships, and the belief that every new model marks another technological frontier. But by late 2025, the narrative began to shift. At Web Summit in Lisbon, it wasn’t bankers or hedge-fund skeptics raising alarms – it was the builders of AI themselves. As we at YourNewsClub observe, this moment signals a rare jolt of self-awareness inside a sector long convinced of its invincibility.
DeepL CEO Jarek Kutylowski was blunt: parts of the market are showing “clear signs of a bubble.” Picsart’s founder Hovhannes Avoyan echoed the concern, pointing out that investors are pouring money into startups with “hype-level valuations and almost no revenue.” What we at YourNewsClub see here is the hallmark of a maturing cycle: capital is no longer flowing into innovation, but into the idea of innovation.
Even long-time champions of AI infrastructure acknowledge the split between technological potential and financial reality. SoftBank, Lyft, Cohere and other major players have quietly admitted a growing mismatch between ambition and sustainability. Analyst Jessica Larn, who specializes in macro-level tech policy, argues that the market is finally separating industry impact from instant monetization. Transformation, she notes, does not guarantee profit – certainly not on the timeline investors demand.
Lyft CEO David Risher tried to strike a more balanced tone. Yes, we are in a financial bubble, he said, but the underlying infrastructure – data centers, compute capacity, enterprise AI systems – will last “a very long time.” In other words, the technology is durable even if the valuations are fragile. It’s a reminder that markets correct faster than industries evolve.
Meanwhile, analysts are recalibrating the scale of the AI build-out. Forecasts suggest that global capital expenditure on next-generation data centers could reach 4 trillion dollars by the end of the decade. To justify that level of investment, the sector would need roughly 3.1 trillion dollars in revenue – a threshold no AI market has ever approached, as we at YourNewsClub have increasingly emphasized in our recent assessments. Freddy Camacho, who examines compute-production chains as political economy, warns that the industry may enter a period of “asymmetric growth,” where infrastructure spending runs ahead of actual demand.
Yet companies remain convinced that 2026 will bring a surge in enterprise adoption. Efficiency gains, automation, and the rise of autonomous “agents” continue to fuel corporate interest. But implementation is proving slower than expected. Kutylowski argues that even top-tier firms are far from a future where AI is fully integrated across operations.
Recent analysis shows the sector is headed not for collapse but for a broad recalibration. The AI industry is maturing. The sheen of inevitability is fading. Every billion-dollar investment now carries the same question: can this model produce real margins? The innovation race continues – but so does the race for sustainability.
If markets can reset their expectations, AI stands to become not a speculative bubble but a stable, long-term economic cycle. Our forecast at Your News Club: within the next 12 to 18 months, the industry will enter a more sober, more pragmatic, and far more competitive phase. And in that phase, winners won’t be the companies that promised the biggest revolutions – but the ones that learn how to monetize them.