Amazon founder and chairman Jeff Bezos has predicted that artificial intelligence (AI) will fundamentally reshape the global economy, even as he warned that the current surge of investment in the sector resembles an unsustainable “industrial bubble.”
Speaking at Italian Tech Week on Friday, Bezos said the excitement around AI has led to unprecedented funding, noting that “every experiment gets funded, every company gets funded, the good ideas and the bad ideas.” He added that investors often struggle to distinguish between the two during periods of hype.
Drawing parallels with the biotechnology bubble of the 1990s and the dot-com boom, Bezos said both periods saw significant investor losses but also delivered transformative advances. “In the biotech bubble, a lot of companies went out of business and investors lost money. But we did get a couple of lifesaving drugs,” he said. “The internet bubble left behind the infrastructure for the modern digital economy.”
Today’s AI boom mirrors these dynamics, he said, with capital flowing not only to software startups promising AI applications but also to the underlying infrastructure, including chipmakers, cloud platforms, and data centers. Recent deals highlight the scale of the investment surge: Bloomberg reported that BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners is nearing a $40 billion acquisition of Aligned Data Centers, while OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, became the world’s most valuable privately held company with a $500 billion valuation after a secondary share sale.
Bezos emphasized the long-term benefits of AI, predicting the technology will transform nearly every industry and improve productivity worldwide. “AI is going to change every industry and improve the productivity of every company in the world. When the dust settles and you see who the winners are, society benefits from those inventions,” he said.
Amazon itself has invested heavily in AI, leveraging its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure, as well as AI applications in logistics, e-commerce, and its Alexa voice assistant. Bezos concluded that while bubbles may be painful for investors, they accelerate the development of world-changing technologies.
