‘Vibe revenue’: AI companies admit they’re worried about a bubble
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LISBON, Portugal — Top tech executives told CNBC they’re concerned about a bubble forming in the artificial intelligence sector, underscoring growing unease within the industry over soaring valuation.
In recent weeks, markets have been reckoning with the notion that too much capital is pouring into the AI boom, clouding the outlook on revenue and actual profit and putting high valuations into question.
Up to now, warnings around overstretched valuations have mostly come from investors and leaders in the world of finance. Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon and Morgan Stanley’s Ted Pick have warned of potential corrections as valuations of some major tech firms reached historic highs.
The concerns have been crystallized by famed ‘Big Short’ investor Michael Burry, who this week accused major AI infrastructure and cloud providers, or ‘hyperscalers’ of understating depreciation expenses on chips. Burry warned that profits at the likes of Oracle and Meta may be vastly overstated. He recently disclosed put options that bet against Nvidia and Palantir.
However, CEOs of companies who are themselves developing AI, expressed their concerns this week during interviews with CNBC at the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon.
“I think the evaluations are pretty exaggerated here and there, and I think there is signs of a bubble on the horizon,” Jarek Kutylowski, CEO of German AI firm DeepL, told CNBC on Tuesday.
The sentiment was echoed by Picsart CEO Hovhannes Avoyan.
“We see lots of AI companies raising … tremendous valuations … without any revenue,” Avoyan told CNBC on Tuesday, adding that it is a “concern.”
The market values smaller startups with “just some noise and vibe revenue,” he said, referring to companies being backed even though they have minimal sales.
Vibe revenue is a play on “vibe coding,” a term that refers to using AI to code without needing deep technical expertise.
AI demand growing
Even with concerns over valuations, the technology industry remains bullish on the long term potential of AI.
Lyft CEO David Risher said there are reasons to be optimistic given the potential impact of AI but acknowledged the risks.
“Let’s be clear, we are absolutely in a financial bubble. There is no question, right? Because this is incredible, transformational technology. No one wants to be left behind.”
Risher went on to argue that there is a difference between the financial bubble and the industrial outlook.
“The data centers and all the model creation, all of that is going to have a long, long life, because it’s transformational. It makes people’s lives easier. It makes people’s lives better… On the other hand, you know, the financial side, it’s a little risky right now.”
The tech CEOs also addressed their outlook on AI demand for 2026 from businesses, as investors look for any clues as to what this will look like.
“I think there’s a lot of demand, and there’s a lot of interest. I think everybody understands that AI can do magical things to businesses, and… we can all operate on another level when it comes to efficiency,” Kutylowski said.
Still, businesses are “strugging in adopting” AI. “We’re going to get further, but I don’t think we’re that we’re going to be in a place where we can say, like every enterprise, every organization, has it figured out totally,” Kutylowski said.
DeepL’s core product is an AI translation tool but it recently launched a more general purpose “agent” designed to be able to carry out tasks on behalf of employees.
Francois Chadwick, the chief financial officer of Cohere, a company that is also focused on enterprise AI, told CNBC on Tuesday that “demand is definitely there.”
$4 trillion capex outlook
Despite the concerns over overstretched valuations and huge capex spend, the investment into artificial intelligence doesn’t appear to be slowing down. A report from venture capital group Accel released this week showed that the buildout of new AI data center capacity is forecast to reach 117 gigawatts by 2030 which translates into about $4 trillion worth of capital expenditure over the next 5 years.
About $3.1 trillion worth of revenue is required to pay back that capex, according to the Accel report.
Already this year, there have been a slew of deals worth billions announced by the likes of Nvidia and OpenAI as they look to develop data center capacity around the world in a bid to keep up with demand.
Philippe Botteri, a partner at Accel, said that three major factors will drive that revenue — more powerful AI models that require capacity to be trained, the use of new AI services and the “agentic revolution in the enterprise.”
“Agentic” is often a term used to describe a type of AI tool that can automatically carry out tasks on behalf of users.
But not everyone believes that the large amount of spending is necessary.
Ben Harburg, managing partner at Novo Capital says the figures being discussed by large tech firms for future investment may be overblown.
“We hear these crazy headline numbers about how much energy is going to be needed, how many chips are going to be needed, although, again, I think that there is probably more of a bubble brewing there than on kind of the front end, the actual product front,” Harburg told CNBC on Tuesday.
“I think we’re starting to realize that there’s been probably over exuberance around data centers. Even Sam [Altman], I think, would privately admit that they need fewer chips than they originally set out, they need less capital than they originally set out. They need less energy than they originally set out.”
