If the AI boom had a physical form, it was alive and kicking at Web Summit this week as 71,000 startup founders, venture capital investors, tech CEOs, and the media who follow them gathered under literal storm clouds in Lisbon, Portugal, to discuss the future of the industry.
Tech stocks sold off dramatically as the conference wore on, after ‘Big Short’ investor Michael Burry pointed out that some AI hyperscaler tech companies—including Meta and Oracle—were elongating the depreciation schedules of their AI capital expenditure (capex) to make their short-term profitability look more favourable. The Nasdaq Composite lost 2.3% yesterday. In addition, Oracle shares declined by 30% over the last month as investors rejected the company’s plan to increase its debt in large part to spend more on AI chips.
But few people inside the giant dome of the MEO arena at Web Summit seemed concerned. Fortune asked a dozen executives at the conference for their opinions. What follows is a selection of their perspectives.
Broadly, people fell into three categories of opinion on whether AI spending is sustainable:
Yes, it’s a bubble. The amount of venture capital investment and capex from large companies far exceeds the amount of revenue being generated by the AI companies that receive the funding—a classic bubble scenario.
