Pralaya, in Hindu mythology, is a dissolution of the manifested universe. Part of the cosmic cycle, it is a necessary event for renewal and recreation.
As a concept, Pralaya is not confined to Hinduism. Nearly every religion has the Day of Judgement, or End of Days, or the final battle between Good and Evil, and so forth. Such a thing can also be spotted in the world of business, though it does not take a yuga to occur.
But first, what are the signs that a bubble is being formed?
Jeff Bezos says it is when every experiment and every company gets funded, when both good ideas as well as bad get funded, and investors have a hard time distinguishing between the two. Speaking at the Italian Tech Week 2025, the Amazon founder said there were such signs to be seen in the world of artificial intelligence (AI). Ruchir Sharma of Rockefeller International, writing in the Financial Times, pointed out that investments by companies in AI accounted for a 40 percent share of the US GDP growth this year.
The investments are unavoidable. A simple search operation by an AI chatbot costs about 10 times more than traditional search (it feels awkward to call internet search traditional, but that is the pace of change we are riding). According to McKinsey & Company, the consultancy firm, data centres are projected to require $6.7 trillion worldwide by 2030 to keep pace with the demand for compute power. Of this, $5.2 trillion is expected to be the capital expenditure needed in data centres handling AI processing loads.
That said, some AI-related investments are raising eyebrows because of their alleged circular nature. At the centre of this is OpenAI, which, according to estimates, has sewed up $1 trillion worth of deals this year with Nvidia, AMD, Oracle and others.
The valuations tell a tale. OpenAI and Anthropic, two of the early AI leaders, are believed to have seen a three-fold increase in their valuations. Oracle, benefiting from the demand for data centres, gained $250 billion in a single day in the wake of declaring results that were better than expected. All this despite a report by the MIT Media Lab in August that 95 percent of organisations were getting no returns from their investments in AI systems.
In a curious twist, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has sounded the alarm about a possible AI bubble. Speaking to reporters in mid-August, he said investors were getting “overexcited” about AI just as they had about tech before the dotcom bubble burst at the turn of the century. Bezos, too, invoked the dotcom bubble, recalling how Amazon’s share price had crashed from $113 a share to $6. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg is another who has spoken of a possible bubble in AI.
However, the bubble talk is not being a deterrent to investments. “If we end up misspending a couple hundred billion dollars,” Zuckerberg said, “that’s going to be very unfortunate obviously. But I would say the risk is higher on the other side.” The other side is being late to the era-defining technology that AI promises to be.
On the positive side, the much-reviled dotcom bubble yielded some of today’s tech giants and led to transformative technologies and business models. Ecommerce, search, digital advertising and cloud-based services emerged from the debris of the dotcom bubble. Venture capital evolved and economies became increasingly digital.
Maybe AI is a bubble that will burst one day. But we might still get immense positives. At the very least, we will have gains in productivity that will change the way we live and work.
Pralaya is part of the cosmic cycle.
Suveen Sinha
Editor, Forbes India
Email: suveen.sinha@nw18.com
X ID: @suveensinha
First Published: Oct 21, 2025, 14:42
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