18 October 2026

The Global AI Bust

Foreign Affairs | Ruchir Sharma

Commercial artificial intelligence is spreading faster than any historic industrial innovation, yet faces an impending market correction as capital expenditure outpaces immediate economic return. Historical precedents from the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution and the 1990s dot-com boom demonstrate that transformative technologies require foundational infrastructure and prolonged adaptation before generating measurable macroeconomic gains.

This structural lag risks severe financial volatility for overextended developers and investors who underestimate the lengthy timeline required for widespread productivity integration. Market corrections typically prune speculative excess while preserving core technologies that eventually redefine industrial capacity across global economies. Understanding this cyclical transition helps policymakers and investors distinguish between unsustainable financial speculation and durable technological utility.

Comment

Commercial artificial intelligence infrastructure spending currently echoes the transcontinental railway mania of the nineteenth century, where capital deployment vastly preceded productive monetization. The resulting market correction will likely strand speculative server capacity while forcing a painful rationalisation across semiconductor foundries and cloud providers. Similar to the fiber-optic glut following the dot-com collapse, overbuilt data centres will endure a prolonged phase of depressed utilization before broader enterprise software integration catches up with hardware deployment.

Strategic Question for Discussion
If data centre capacity continues to outpace enterprise software adoption, which segment of the semiconductor supply chain absorbs the financial correction first, and what does that reveal about capital sustainability?
The pattern suggests that leading-edge foundry operators and specialized chip designers face the initial shock as overextended hyperscalers defer capital expenditure. This points to a severe contraction in high-margin advanced packaging demand rather than a permanent halt in foundational research.
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