Goldman Sachs says the AI boom now looks like tech stocks did in 1997, several years before the dot-com bubble burst. The bank flagged five warning signs from the late 1990s investors should watch: peak investment spending, falling corporate profits, rising corporate debt, Fed rate cuts, and widening credit spreads.
The Warnings Today
Investment spending: Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Apple are on track to spend $349 billion on capex in 2025. Corporate profits: S&P 500 margins at 13.1%, above the five-year average of 12.1%. Corporate debt: Meta raised $30 billion in bonds in October. Most firms finance capex with free cash flow, and debt relative to profits looks lower than 2000. Fed cuts: The Fed cut 25 basis points in October with another expected in December. Credit spreads: Remain historically tight but widened to 3.15% from 2.76% in late October.My Take
Goldman says we’re in 1997, not 1999, meaning there’s time before things break. I’m not sure. Investment spending is clearly peaking at $349 billion. Profits still look strong, but that’s because we’re early in the spending cycle. Debt ratios might look better than 2000, but hyperscalers issued $121 billion this year, four times their average, and banks are already hedging the exposure. Fed is cutting. Spreads are widening. The only thing missing is falling profits. In the 1990s these signs appeared two years before the crash, but nobody knows when two years is up. When I look at OpenAI’s $207 billion funding hole, ChatGPT growth slowing to 6% while competitors grow 30-370%, and AI adoption stuck at 11%, the monetization piece keeps getting shakier. We might not be at 1999 yet, but the imbalances are building fast.Hedgie🤗
🦔Goldman Sachs says the AI boom now looks like tech stocks did in 1997, several years before the dot-com bubble burst. The bank flagged five warning signs from the late 1990s investors should watch: peak investment spending, falling corporate profits, rising corporate debt, Fed… pic.twitter.com/s7FSCf1z93
— Hedgie (@HedgieMarkets) December 6, 2025
🦔True, the infrastructure stays even if the bubble pops. But in 2000 we got dark fiber and empty office parks. This time we might get data centers nobody can afford to run because electricity costs too much and the models got commoditized.
— Hedgie (@HedgieMarkets) December 6, 2025