Sam Altman admitted we’re in the midst of an AI bubble Thursday, but don’t let that fool you: He still intends to rule over whatever’s left after it bursts. 

A bubble, the OpenAI CEO told a select group of reporters at a dinner Thursday night, is what happens when a bunch of smart people get too excited about something that nonetheless contains a kernel of truth. By that definition, Altman said, we’re in the midst of a big ol’ ready-to-burst AI bubble. 

“If you look at most of the bubbles in history, like the tech bubble, there was a real thing,” Altman said, according to a report from The Verge. “Tech was really important. The internet was a really big deal. People got overexcited.”

He continued, “Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? My opinion is yes. Is AI the most important thing to happen in a very long time? My opinion is also yes.”

In other words, the dot-com bust didn’t kill the internet as we know it, and many of the ideas pioneered during that era, such as e-commerce and search, engendered trillion-dollar companies. By that analogy, AI will probably survive the implosion of the uncountable number of startups who’ve hoped to grab a piece of the pie before it spoils.

One reason the bubble may burst is a lack of GPUs. That’s a problem that Altman highlighted last night, too, noting that a GPU crunch was behind OpenAI’s decision to design ChatGPT-5 with a focus on optimizing inference cost instead of power. We saw how well that turned out. 

Then there are datacenters, where tech giants and colocation companies have all sunk billions into in order to power AI models, and which could themselves end up being an AI bottleneck that gets caught up in the collapse of the bubble. 

Altman, who would likely prefer to hold the pin than be caught in the pop, seems about as concerned that the AI bubble is going to burst as any other datacenter provider right now: i.e., he’s not.

“You should expect OpenAI to spend trillions of dollars on data center construction in the not very distant future,” Altman told those assembled for dinner last night. “We have better models, and we just can’t offer them because we don’t have the capacity. We have other kinds of new products and services we’d love to offer.”

No telling where those trillions of dollars will come from. OpenAI has already raised, or at least secured commitments to raise, tens of billions from Microsoft, Softbank, Oracle, and a variety of other companies, but the company is nowhere close to raking in that kind of money. It’s currently on track to generate revenue of $10 billion this year, up from $5.5 billion last year, when it also lost $5 billion, according to Reuters. That’s pretty impressive for a company that was barely on investors’ radar before ChatGPT came out, but far from the massive cash flows enjoyed by giants like Microsoft, Amazon, or Google.

So yes, AI is a bubble – you heard it from the man who has been filling it with hot air himself. And he has no intention to let off the pump. ®