Reprinted from TidBITS by permission; reuse governed by Creative Commons license BY-NC-ND 3.0. TidBITS has offered years of thoughtful commentary on Apple and Internet topics. For free email subscriptions and access to the entire TidBITS archive, visit http://www.tidbits.com/ Benefits of the AI Bubble Adam Engst At Stratechery, [1]Ben Thompson writes: What goes up must come down, which is to say bubbles that inflate eventually pop, with the end result being a recession and lots of bankrupt companies. And, not to spoil the story, that will almost certainly happen to the AI bubble as well. What is important to keep in mind, however, is that that is not the end of the story, at least in the best case. Bubbles have real benefits. We are, of course, in an AI bubble, and billions of dollars of investment will evaporate when the bubble bursts. However, as Ben Thompson points out, bubbles aren't inherently bad. They drive overexuberant investment into both infrastructure and innovations that are left over to power the next wave of technology. The dot-com bubble gave us the fiber that became the backbone of today's Internet, and it brought hundreds of millions of people online, creating a market for consumer Internet firms and a population capable of working on the Web. In the case of AI, although the money spent on short-lived Nvidia GPUs may be wasted, the investment in chip fabs and power generation will be the foundation of an increasingly digital and electrified society. [2]Read original article References 1. https://stratechery.com/2025/the-benefits-of-bubbles/ 2. https://stratechery.com/2025/the-benefits-of-bubbles/ .