Uber early investor Gurley: The AI bubble is about to burst; the crippled SaaS industry presents an opportunity.
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Goldman Sachs: It's too early to call AI trading a bubble; investors shouldn't exit prematurely.
According to BlockBeats, on July 2nd, Goldman Sachs believes investors should not prematurely withdraw from the artificial intelligence (AI) theme. Despite the significant gains in AI-related stocks this year and rising concerns about a bubble, Ben Snider, Head of US Equity Strategy at Goldman Sachs, stated that the current market is more like an earnings-driven bull market than a speculative frenzy supported solely by valuation expansion. Snider believes AI investment opportunities remain concentrated in three main areas: AI infrastructure, power infrastructure, and recently underperforming cloud vendors and hyperscale platforms. The first includes semiconductors, servers, AI networking equipment, and data center hardware; the second includes power equipment, utilities, and energy infrastructure supporting data center expansion; and the third includes large platform companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet, Oracle, and IBM. Goldman Sachs' core argument is that while many AI infrastructure stocks have surged, their valuations have not deviated from earnings expectations as typically seen in bubbles. Some storage, semiconductor, and data center-related stocks still reflect market skepticism rather than unanimous optimism. In other words, investors are still demanding that these companies demonstrate through orders, profit margins, and cash flow that AI capital expenditures can translate into profits. Goldman Sachs is not advocating indiscriminate buying of all AI concept stocks, but rather continuing to bet on companies that can directly benefit from AI capital expenditures and generate revenue and profit growth. They believe that AI trading has not yet entered a phase of "just telling stories, not looking at profits." As long as earnings continue to be revised upwards, AI infrastructure is likely to remain one of the most important themes in the US stock market.
On the day the lock-up period for Zhipu's cornerstone investors expired, nearly 70% of them expressed their intention to hold the shares long-term.
According to a report by the Securities Times on July 7th, as the lock-up period for cornerstone investors in Hong Kong-listed Zhipu approaches, several institutional investors have expressed their long-term optimism and commitment to continue holding the shares. JSC International Investment Fund SPC stated that based on its long-term positive outlook on the company's future development, it is willing to continue holding its shares. According to public information, the core state-owned investors behind its managed funds include the Beijing Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund, Beijing Jingneng Green Energy M&A Investment Fund, Beijing Information Industry Development Investment Fund, and Beijing Zhongguancun Science City Phase III Technology Growth Equity Investment Partnership. Professional market-oriented investment institutions WT Asset Management and Optimas Capital Limited, as well as Zhipu's early shareholder and cornerstone investor Lingyun Optoelectronic Technology Co., Ltd., have also successively stated that they will continue to hold the company's shares, and will proceed in an orderly manner should any future reduction plans arise. The institutions that have simultaneously expressed their support hold nearly 70% of the cornerstone shares to be released from lock-up, encompassing national-level strategic capital, local government industrial guidance funds, large state-owned enterprise industrial funds, and market-oriented professional investment institutions.
More severe than the dot-com bubble: Token consumption plummeted by 20%, and the gap between AI investment and sales growth reached 46%.
According to Beating's monitoring, the Silicon Data LLM Token consumption index, which tracks users' actual computing power expenditure, has fallen nearly 20% from its May high. This sudden halt in high growth sends a crucial warning to investors: large model vendors may be losing pricing power with cost-sensitive clients, and it has also raised doubts about the ultimate return on investment for the hundreds of billions of dollars in AI capital expenditure. The divide between bulls and bears has intensified. Bears point out that Allianz Research data shows the growth gap between AI investment and sales has reached 46%, exceeding the 32% imbalance seen during the 2001 telecom bubble burst. Bulls counter that while the average token price has plummeted by 90% since 2023, total expenditure has still nearly doubled, meaning the index decline is merely a structural digestion after price cuts stimulated consumption, and the long-term return on investment in the inference phase is far more optimistic than in the training phase. Increased policy regulation is translating into hidden compliance costs for enterprise users. Washington has imposed stronger policy scrutiny on the distribution and cross-border access of cutting-edge models (such as the release review of OpenAI and geopolitical export controls on Anthropic models). Coupled with the EU's Artificial Intelligence Act's stringent compliance requirements for top-tier models, this has placed a heavy policy burden on leading platforms. To mitigate geopolitical and compliance risks, corporate CFOs have a more rational reason to proactively shift their workloads towards lightweight models that are less subject to regulatory constraints. Subtle changes are also emerging in the hardware chip sector. Although orders for top-tier GPUs and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) are booked until 2026, with substantial supply-demand easing not expected until 2028, the market's main procurement focus has shifted from training chips to inference optimization hardware, and the winners are being reshuffled.
Arthur Hayes, inventor of perpetual contracts: The AI bubble is most likely to burst in 2028.
On June 26th, Arthur Hayes stated on the "Bonnie Blockchain" podcast that if he had to guess when the AI bubble would burst, he believes the most likely time would be 2028. His reasoning is simple: most of this round of AI debt will be incurred between 2024 and 2026, while GPUs have an actual lifespan of only two years, yet Wall Street depreciates them over six years. Two and a half years later, will the H100 and Blackwell chips bought at high prices still generate sufficient revenue? If by then, Chinese models will perform just as well, running on Huawei chips, at only one-tenth the price, then the entire economic logic of Western data centers will evaporate instantly.
Reuters: Nearly 1,700 British investors have filed a lawsuit in London against Binance and CZ, seeking £150 million in damages.
According to Reuters, nearly 1,700 British investors are suing cryptocurrency exchange Binance and its founder CZ(CZ) in the London High Court, seeking at least £150 million (approximately $200 million) in damages. The plaintiffs allege that Binance entities, since the end of 2019, have been selling high-risk and complex cryptocurrency derivatives, including leveraged products, to UK retail investors without regulatory authorization, and have violated the UK's Financial Services and Markets Act by promoting such products. Some plaintiffs claim they have suffered losses of tens of thousands of pounds as a result. The defendants in the lawsuit reportedly include Binance Holdings, registered in the Cayman Islands; Nest Exchange, registered in the UAE; CZ; and other unnamed operators of the Binance trading platform. A Binance spokesperson declined to comment specifically on the ongoing litigation, but stated that the company will actively defend itself and emphasized Binance's commitment to fulfilling its obligations to users and operating within the framework of applicable law. Background information shows that the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) explicitly prohibited cryptocurrency companies from offering derivatives services to retail clients in 2021.
BIS: The bursting of the AI bubble and opaque financing constitute core risks to the global financial system.
According to Mars Finance, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) warned in its latest annual report that the bursting of the AI bubble, a rebound in inflation, and sovereign debt pressures are the three core risks threatening global economic prosperity. The report points out that if returns on investment in the AI sector fall short of expectations, the current capital expenditure boom could turn into a long-term investment contraction, triggering significant macroeconomic turmoil. The BIS specifically warned of the complex "circular financing" models within the AI industry chain, such as cross-shareholdings and computing power-binding procurement agreements between chip manufacturers and AI labs or cloud service providers. The institution emphasized that such transactions often lack transparency and pose the risk of the same asset being multiple times pledged. Furthermore, energy shocks from geopolitical conflicts could trigger a second wave of inflation, which, coupled with highly leveraged arbitrage trading by hedge funds in the government bond market, will further exacerbate the fragility of the global financial system.