Jeff Bezos has forecast that artificial intelligence will fundamentally transform the global economy, even as he cautioned that the current surge of capital flowing into the sector resembles a speculative bubble.
Speaking at Italian Tech Week on Friday, the Amazon founder and chairman described the benefits of AI as “gigantic,” but warned that the frenzy of investment sweeping through the industry makes it difficult to separate good ideas from bad ones.
Bezos compared today’s enthusiasm for AI to the biotechnology boom of the 1990s and the dot-com bubble that followed. Both episodes cost investors vast sums but ultimately produced breakthroughs that reshaped society. “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 of the modern digital economy.”
He argued that a similar process is now underway in artificial intelligence, with vast sums pouring not only into software firms promising new AI applications but also into the infrastructure supporting them—chipmakers, cloud providers, and data centers. Some companies are raising billions before demonstrating viable products.
Investor appetite remains strong. Bloomberg reported Friday that BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners is nearing a $40 billion acquisition of Aligned Data Centers, underscoring the demand for AI-related assets. Meanwhile, OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, recently became the most valuable privately held company in the world after a secondary share sale that valued it at $500 billion.
Despite the risks, Bezos said society would ultimately benefit. “AI is going to change every industry and improve the productivity of every company in the world,” he predicted. “When the dust settles and you see who the winners are, society benefits from those inventions.”
Amazon itself has made substantial investments in AI, particularly through Amazon Web Services, which provides the computing infrastructure used by many startups, as well as through its logistics operations, e-commerce systems, and Alexa voice assistant. For Bezos, this underlines a broader truth: bubbles can be damaging to investors, but they also accelerate the development of transformative technologies.
“That’s what’s going to happen here, too,” he concluded.
