The AI boom helped make the world’s 500 wealthiest people $2.2 trillion richer in 2025. To Bill Gurley, one of Silicon Valley’s sage investors and a general partner at Benchmark, those astronomical gains in wealth are a sign of an inflating AI bubble that is bound to pop.
The AI boom is following the pattern of other eras of technological growth, in which early gains for some tech firms have sparked a wave of spending that will ultimately be unsustainable for dozens of companies, Gurley said in an CNBC interview on Monday. Companies will soon have to curtail their spending and revise their valuations, or otherwise risk failing.
“When people get rich quick, a whole bunch of people come in and want to get rich too, and that’s why we end up with bubbles,” Gurley said. “One day we’re going to have an AI reset, because waves create bubbles, because interlopers come in.”
The venture capitalist added that investors should “start gobbling [software-as-a-service stocks] up” following the reset. The sector has been hit particularly hard by AI disruptions as a result of AI agents being able to automate workflows more cheaply than existing SaaS tools. Salesforce and ServiceNow stocks have lost more than 20% of their respective value since the start of 2026.
