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AI bubble talk grips the market. But in the C-suite there’s more FOMO over AI’s benefits than fear of an AI bustup

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Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition…Nvidia becomes the first $5 trillion market cap company…Anthropic finds AI models have ‘introspection,’ of a kind…and Meta, Alphabet, and Microsoft tell investors just how much they’ve been spending on AI data centers. 

Hello, it’s Jeremy here. I’m just back from Fortune Global Forum in Riyadh, where AI was very much a central feature in many of the discussions. I will provide a few insights from what I learned there.

Of course, there was a lot of discussion at the event about whether there’s an “AI bubble”—and that was before we got the latest earnings and cap ex numbers from Meta, Microsoft, and Alphabet. Wall Street’s disparate reactions to the companies’ quarterly report cards show the market’s growing impatience to see tangible results from hefty AI investments. They will only support companies who can show they are seeing notable revenue impact today.

Why the market reacted so differently to Meta’s, Microsoft’s and Alphabet’s capex numbers

Consider Alphabet, which saw its shares climb after its earnings report. With its quarterly search revenues growing 14.5% year-over-year, and cloud revenues up 32%, Alphabet continues to defy concerns that AI poses an existential innovator’s dilemma to its core advertising-based business model. By contrast, Meta said capital expenses on AI data centers next year would be even larger than the already whopping $70 billion to $72 billion it’s spending this year as CEO Mark Zuckerberg races to build “super-intelligence,” an incredibly ambitious effort with limited immediate revenue impact. Investors weren’t having it, and Meta’s shares got hammered, dropping 9% in pre-market trading.

Investor reaction to Microsoft’s earnings fell somewhere between these two extremes. Like Alphabet, it reported revenue numbers that exceeded consensus analyst forecasts, but not by much, and it also said capital expenditures would climb more than analysts had anticipated. So it saw its shares slide about in line with investors’ disappointment in the size of the gap between revenue acceleration and capital expense growth, even though Microsoft’s cloud computing sales were up an impressive 40% from last year, a figure it largely attributed to AI spending.

What was striking at Fortune Global Forum, however, was how little global executives seemed to care about these financial market dynamics. If there was any consensus from the discussions in Riyadh, it was that the current moment is a lot like the early days of the internet or the roll out of cloud computing in the mid-2000s and early-2010s. In other words, a real technological transformation is underway. Yes, it might involve some companies becoming overvalued—as did happen with the internet boom. But almost all agreed that AI is going to have a transformative and lasting impact on their companies, and on the world economy, even if there is a market correction.

Executives are finding value in AI

At an IBM-sponsored dinner at FGF that Fortune-hosted, Ana Paula Assis, IBM’s senior vice president and chair for EMEA and growth markets, said that, in her experience, it wasn’t the fear of an AI bubble—the concern that AI might just a flash in the pan that doesn’t live up to the hype—that held companies back from investing in the technology. Instead, it was the speed of AI innovation that was actually the problem. Some companies, she said, seemed worried they would build systems around one set of models and capabilities, only to have those eclipsed in just a few months or a year, requiring them to change those workflows and swap models again. She described some potential customers as “like deer in the headlights” dazzled and frozen in place by the pace of change.

On stage at the conference, Ruth Porat, the president and chief investment officer at Alphabet, echoed Assis’s view to some degree. She noted that there was a big disparity between the speed of AI advances and the speed at which companies were adopting the technology. She said this disparity was largely the result of how difficult it is for large enterprises to change internal processes in general. And to get the most out of AI requires companies to rethink every process, she said, so it is perhaps not surprising that this is happening much more slowly than the rate at which AI companies, including Google, are rolling out new AI models and capabilities.

IBM put out some survey results this week for EMEA enterprises that show companies are indeed moving ahead with deploying AI at scale. Its survey of 3,500 senior executives in 10 countries found that two-thirds reported “significant productivity gains” from deploying AI. In some sectors, such as finance, the figure was 72%. Adoption in Saudi Arabia was even higher still—84%. What’s more, across EMEA, 92% of those surveyed were confident that AI agents would deliver ROI within the next two years. (Which may prove the point about the tech capabilities running far ahead of adoption. You might remember how many top tech execs declared 2025 to be “the year of AI agents.” I guess the real year of AI agents might be 2027!)

Ok, with that, here’s more AI news.

Jeremy Kahn
jeremy.kahn@fortune.com
@jeremyakahn

FORTUNE ON AI

Character.AI bans teens from talking to its chatbots amid mounting lawsuits and regulatory pressure—by Beatrice Nolan

Everyone thinks AI is replacing factory workers, but Amazon’s layoffs show it’s coming for middle management first—by Eva Roytburg

Martin Sorrell says AI has already ‘missed the Oppenheimer moment’—by Allie Garfinkle

Longevity science is on the cusp of major breakthroughs thanks to AI, but significant ‘data gaps’ need to be filled, expert says—Alexei Oreskovic

AI IN THE NEWS

Nvidia becomes world’s first $5 trillion company as it reveals $500 million order backlog. The AI chip company became the first business ever to reach a $5 trillion market capitalization, after its shares rose earlier in the week following several announcements by its CEO and founder, Jensen Huang, at a developer conference in Washington, D.C. Huang revealed that the company has a $500 billion order backlog for its latest Blackwell GPUs and its upcoming Rubin GPUs. The company has also recently announced deeper partnerships and investments with OpenAI, Oracle, and Eli Lilly. Nvidia has seen its market cap add $3 trillion in value since early 2024. Read more from The Wall Street Journal here.

Fed Chair Powell says AI boom not comparable to dot com bubble. U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said the current artificial intelligence boom differs from the dot-com bubble because today’s leading companies—and here he seems to have been referring to the likes of Nvidia, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta, as opposed to the AI model makers such as OpenAI and Anthropic—actually generate profits. He also noted that the AI boom is driving tangible economic growth through investments in data centers and chips. (Although it should be said that the dot com bubble also fueled capital investment in fiber optics and networking equipment.) He contrasted this with the 1990s internet frenzy, when many high-valued firms collapsed after failing to turn a profit. You can read more from CNBC here.

Anthropic says cutting-edge AI models may have a kind of introspection. The AI company said its Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 models exhibit early signs of introspection—the ability to detect and describe aspects of their own internal states rather than just generate plausible text. In experiments, Anthropic researchers “injected” specific neural activation patterns that they knew were associated with particular concepts into the model at times when it was not considering topics related to those concepts. It then asked the model whether it noticed anything different about its thinking in these instances. The models were able to correctly identify some of these “thoughts” as not their own some of the time, indicating a limited form of self-monitoring, according to the Anthropic researchers. This introspective behavior, however, was highly inconsistent—occurring only about 20% of the time—and its underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Anthropic cautions that while intriguing, these findings do not imply human-like self-awareness but could help advance future work on model transparency and interpretability. You can read more in Anthropic’s blog post on the research here.

Study finds top AI models can’t construct predictive “world models.” A group of researchers from the non-profit AI lab the Basis Research Institute and affiliated with MIT, Harvard University, the University of Montreal, the University of Cambridge and Cornell University, built a new benchmark to test how leading LLMs perform at tasks that require understanding a virtual world, including discovering links between cause and effect and the “rules” by which the world operates. Their new “AutumnBench” involves a suite of 43 grid-world environments with 129 tasks, including predicting which objects are behind an obstruction, planning, and detecting what’s changed in a scene and the likely cause. They looked at how three state-of-the-art reasoning models— Anthropic’s Claude 4 Sonnet, Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, and OpenAI’s o3—compared against 517 human participants. They allowed the test subjects to spend some time exploring each virtual world and deploying strategies to figure out the rules of the world before testing them on the tasks. The results show that humans significantly outperform the AI models across all task types and environments. What’s more, they found that the models fail to adopt human-like strategies for determining the rules of the virtual worlds and how to perform the tasks, such as hypothesis-testing and updating their beliefs to account for new evidence. You can read the research paper here.

AI CALENDAR

Nov. 10-13: Web Summit, Lisbon. 

Nov. 26-27: World AI Congress, London.

Dec. 2-7: NeurIPS, San Diego.

Dec. 8-9: Fortune Brainstorm AI San Francisco. Apply to attend here.

EYE ON AI NUMBERS

$78.2 billion

That’s the amount that just Meta, Microsoft, and Alphabet collectively spent building new AI data centers and buying AI hardware in the three months between the end of June and the end of September. And all three companies signaled they plan to continue to ramp up that spending further over the next quarter and throughout 2026. You can read more here from the Financial Times. 



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Senate Dems’ plan to fix Obamacare premiums adds nearly $300 billion to deficit, CRFB says

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December 5, 2025

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The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) is a nonpartisan watchdog that regularly estimates how much the U.S. Congress is adding to the $38 trillion national debt.

With enhanced Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies due to expire within days, some Senate Democrats are scrambling to protect millions of Americans from getting the unpleasant holiday gift of spiking health insurance premiums. The CRFB says there’s just one problem with the plan: It’s not funded.

“With the national debt as large as the economy and interest payments costing $1 trillion annually, it is absurd to suggest adding hundreds of billions more to the debt,” CRFB President Maya MacGuineas wrote in a statement on Friday afternoon.

The proposal, backed by members of the Senate Democratic caucus, would fully extend the enhanced ACA subsidies for three years, from 2026 through 2028, with no additional income limits on who can qualify. Those subsidies, originally boosted during the pandemic and later renewed, were designed to lower premiums and prevent coverage losses for middle‑ and lower‑income households purchasing insurance on the ACA exchanges.

CRFB estimated that even this three‑year extension alone would add roughly $300 billion to federal deficits over the next decade, largely because the federal government would continue to shoulder a larger share of premium costs while enrollment and subsidy amounts remain elevated. If Congress ultimately moves to make the enhanced subsidies permanent—as many advocates have urged—the total cost could swell to nearly $550 billion in additional borrowing over the next decade.

Reversing recent guardrails

MacGuineas called the Senate bill “far worse than even a debt-financed extension” as it would roll back several “program integrity” measures that were enacted as part of a 2025 reconciliation law and were intended to tighten oversight of ACA subsidies. On top of that, it would be funded by borrowing even more. “This is a bad idea made worse,” MacGuineas added.

The watchdog group’s central critique is that the new Senate plan does not attempt to offset its costs through spending cuts or new revenue and, in their view, goes beyond a simple extension by expanding the underlying subsidy structure.

The legislation would permanently repeal restrictions that eliminated subsidies for certain groups enrolling during special enrollment periods and would scrap rules requiring full repayment of excess advance subsidies and stricter verification of eligibility and tax reconciliation. The bill would also nullify portions of a 2025 federal regulation that loosened limits on the actuarial value of exchange plans and altered how subsidies are calculated, effectively reshaping how generous plans can be and how federal support is determined. CRFB warned these reversals would increase costs further while weakening safeguards designed to reduce misuse and error in the subsidy system.

MacGuineas said that any subsidy extension should be paired with broader reforms to curb health spending and reduce overall borrowing. In her view, lawmakers are missing a chance to redesign ACA support in a way that lowers premiums while also improving the long‑term budget outlook.

The debate over ACA subsidies recently contributed to a government funding standoff, and CRFB argued that the new Senate bill reflects a political compromise that prioritizes short‑term relief over long‑term fiscal responsibility.

“After a pointless government shutdown over this issue, it is beyond disappointing that this is the preferred solution to such an important issue,” MacGuineas wrote.

The off-year elections cast the government shutdown and cost-of-living arguments in a different light. Democrats made stunning gains and almost flipped a deep-red district in Tennessee as politicians from the far left and center coalesced around “affordability.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is reportedly smelling blood in the water and doubling down on the theme heading into the pivotal midterm elections of 2026. President Donald Trump is scheduled to visit Pennsylvania soon to discuss pocketbook anxieties. But he is repeating predecessor Joe Biden’s habit of dismissing inflation, despite widespread evidence to the contrary.

“We fixed inflation, and we fixed almost everything,” Trump said in a Tuesday cabinet meeting, in which he also dismissed affordability as a “hoax” pushed by Democrats.​

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle now face a politically fraught choice: allow premiums to jump sharply—including in swing states like Pennsylvania where ACA enrollees face double‑digit increases—or pass an expensive subsidy extension that would, as CRFB calculates, explode the deficit without addressing underlying health care costs.



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Netflix–Warner Bros. deal sets up $72 billion antitrust test

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December 5, 2025

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Netflix Inc. has won the heated takeover battle for Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. Now it must convince global antitrust regulators that the deal won’t give it an illegal advantage in the streaming market. 

The $72 billion tie-up joins the world’s dominant paid streaming service with one of Hollywood’s most iconic movie studios. It would reshape the market for online video content by combining the No. 1 streaming player with the No. 4 service HBO Max and its blockbuster hits such as Game Of Thrones, Friends, and the DC Universe comics characters franchise.  

That could raise red flags for global antitrust regulators over concerns that Netflix would have too much control over the streaming market. The company faces a lengthy Justice Department review and a possible US lawsuit seeking to block the deal if it doesn’t adopt some remedies to get it cleared, analysts said.

“Netflix will have an uphill climb unless it agrees to divest HBO Max as well as additional behavioral commitments — particularly on licensing content,” said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Jennifer Rie. “The streaming overlap is significant,” she added, saying the argument that “the market should be viewed more broadly is a tough one to win.”

By choosing Netflix, Warner Bros. has jilted another bidder, Paramount Skydance Corp., a move that risks touching off a political battle in Washington. Paramount is backed by the world’s second-richest man, Larry Ellison, and his son, David Ellison, and the company has touted their longstanding close ties to President Donald Trump. Their acquisition of Paramount, which closed in August, has won public praise from Trump. 

Comcast Corp. also made a bid for Warner Bros., looking to merge it with its NBCUniversal division.

The Justice Department’s antitrust division, which would review the transaction in the US, could argue that the deal is illegal on its face because the combined market share would put Netflix well over a 30% threshold.

The White House, the Justice Department and Comcast didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. 

US lawmakers from both parties, including Republican Representative Darrell Issa and Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren have already faulted the transaction — which would create a global streaming giant with 450 million users — as harmful to consumers.

“This deal looks like an anti-monopoly nightmare,” Warren said after the Netflix announcement. Utah Senator Mike Lee, a Republican, said in a social media post earlier this week that a Warner Bros.-Netflix tie-up would raise more serious competition questions “than any transaction I’ve seen in about a decade.”

European Union regulators are also likely to subject the Netflix proposal to an intensive review amid pressure from legislators. In the UK, the deal has already drawn scrutiny before the announcement, with House of Lords member Baroness Luciana Berger pressing the government on how the transaction would impact competition and consumer prices.

The combined company could raise prices and broadly impact “culture, film, cinemas and theater releases,”said Andreas Schwab, a leading member of the European Parliament on competition issues, after the announcement.

Paramount has sought to frame the Netflix deal as a non-starter. “The simple truth is that a deal with Netflix as the buyer likely will never close, due to antitrust and regulatory challenges in the United States and in most jurisdictions abroad,” Paramount’s antitrust lawyers wrote to their counterparts at Warner Bros. on Dec. 1.

Appealing directly to Trump could help Netflix avoid intense antitrust scrutiny, New Street Research’s Blair Levin wrote in a note on Friday. Levin said it’s possible that Trump could come to see the benefit of switching from a pro-Paramount position to a pro-Netflix position. “And if he does so, we believe the DOJ will follow suit,” Levin wrote.

Netflix co-Chief Executive Officer Ted Sarandos had dinner with Trump at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida last December, a move other CEOs made after the election in order to win over the administration. In a call with investors Friday morning, Sarandos said that he’s “highly confident in the regulatory process,” contending the deal favors consumers, workers and innovation. 

“Our plans here are to work really closely with all the appropriate governments and regulators, but really confident that we’re going to get all the necessary approvals that we need,” he said.

Netflix will likely argue to regulators that other video services such as Google’s YouTube and ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok should be included in any analysis of the market, which would dramatically shrink the company’s perceived dominance.

The US Federal Communications Commission, which regulates the transfer of broadcast-TV licenses, isn’t expected to play a role in the deal, as neither hold such licenses. Warner Bros. plans to spin off its cable TV division, which includes channels such as CNN, TBS and TNT, before the sale.

Even if antitrust reviews just focus on streaming, Netflix believes it will ultimately prevail, pointing to Amazon.com Inc.’s Prime and Walt Disney Co. as other major competitors, according to people familiar with the company’s thinking. 

Netflix is expected to argue that more than 75% of HBO Max subscribers already subscribe to Netflix, making them complementary offerings rather than competitors, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing confidential deliberations. The company is expected to make the case that reducing its content costs through owning Warner Bros., eliminating redundant back-end technology and bundling Netflix with Max will yield lower prices.



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The rise of AI reasoning models comes with a big energy tradeoff

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December 5, 2025

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Nearly all leading artificial intelligence developers are focused on building AI models that mimic the way humans reason, but new research shows these cutting-edge systems can be far more energy intensive, adding to concerns about AI’s strain on power grids.

AI reasoning models used 30 times more power on average to respond to 1,000 written prompts than alternatives without this reasoning capability or which had it disabled, according to a study released Thursday. The work was carried out by the AI Energy Score project, led by Hugging Face research scientist Sasha Luccioni and Salesforce Inc. head of AI sustainability Boris Gamazaychikov.

The researchers evaluated 40 open, freely available AI models, including software from OpenAI, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Microsoft Corp. Some models were found to have a much wider disparity in energy consumption, including one from Chinese upstart DeepSeek. A slimmed-down version of DeepSeek’s R1 model used just 50 watt hours to respond to the prompts when reasoning was turned off, or about as much power as is needed to run a 50 watt lightbulb for an hour. With the reasoning feature enabled, the same model required 7,626 watt hours to complete the tasks.

The soaring energy needs of AI have increasingly come under scrutiny. As tech companies race to build more and bigger data centers to support AI, industry watchers have raised concerns about straining power grids and raising energy costs for consumers. A Bloomberg investigation in September found that wholesale electricity prices rose as much as 267% over the past five years in areas near data centers. There are also environmental drawbacks, as Microsoft, Google and Amazon.com Inc. have previously acknowledged the data center buildout could complicate their long-term climate objectives. 

More than a year ago, OpenAI released its first reasoning model, called o1. Where its prior software replied almost instantly to queries, o1 spent more time computing an answer before responding. Many other AI companies have since released similar systems, with the goal of solving more complex multistep problems for fields like science, math and coding.

Though reasoning systems have quickly become the industry norm for carrying out more complicated tasks, there has been little research into their energy demands. Much of the increase in power consumption is due to reasoning models generating much more text when responding, the researchers said. 

The new report aims to better understand how AI energy needs are evolving, Luccioni said. She also hopes it helps people better understand that there are different types of AI models suited to different actions. Not every query requires tapping the most computationally intensive AI reasoning systems.

“We should be smarter about the way that we use AI,” Luccioni said. “Choosing the right model for the right task is important.”

To test the difference in power use, the researchers ran all the models on the same computer hardware. They used the same prompts for each, ranging from simple questions — such as asking which team won the Super Bowl in a particular year — to more complex math problems. They also used a software tool called CodeCarbon to track how much energy was being consumed in real time.

The results varied considerably. The researchers found one of Microsoft’s Phi 4 reasoning models used 9,462 watt hours with reasoning turned on, compared with about 18 watt hours with it off. OpenAI’s largest gpt-oss model, meanwhile, had a less stark difference. It used 8,504 watt hours with reasoning on the most computationally intensive “high” setting and 5,313 watt hours with the setting turned down to “low.” 

OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and DeepSeek did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Google released internal research in August that estimated the median text prompt for its Gemini AI service used 0.24 watt-hours of energy, roughly equal to watching TV for less than nine seconds. Google said that figure was “substantially lower than many public estimates.” 

Much of the discussion about AI power consumption has focused on large-scale facilities set up to train artificial intelligence systems. Increasingly, however, tech firms are shifting more resources to inference, or the process of running AI systems after they’ve been trained. The push toward reasoning models is a big piece of that as these systems are more reliant on inference.

Recently, some tech leaders have acknowledged that AI’s power draw needs to be reckoned with. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the industry must earn the “social permission to consume energy” for AI data centers in a November interview. To do that, he argued tech must use AI to do good and foster broad economic growth.



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