{"id":182671,"date":"2025-10-01T14:05:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-01T14:05:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/182671\/"},"modified":"2025-10-01T14:05:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-01T14:05:08","slug":"leading-uk-tech-investor-warns-of-disconcerting-signs-of-ai-stock-bubble-artificial-intelligence-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/182671\/","title":{"rendered":"Leading UK tech investor warns of \u2018disconcerting\u2019 signs of AI stock bubble | Artificial intelligence (AI)"},"content":{"rendered":"

A leading British tech investor has described soaring valuations of artificial intelligence companies as \u201cdisconcerting\u201d, amid concerns of an AI stock market bubble<\/a>.<\/p>\n

James Anderson was an early backer of Tesla, Amazon and China\u2019s Tencent and Alibaba, generating vast returns for Baillie Gifford\u2019s flagship fund. Now at the Italian investment company Lingotto, Anderson said he had not seen signs of an investment bubble until recently, when the ChatGPT developer, OpenAI<\/a>, and its rival Anthropic announced hefty valuation increases.<\/p>\n

\u201cUp until the last couple of months or so\u2009\u2026 what surprised me in one sense is that there wasn\u2019t really much sign of a bubble [in AI],\u201d he told the Financial Times<\/a>.<\/p>\n

OpenAI is reportedly in talks about a share sale that would value the startup at $500bn<\/a> (\u00a3370bn), up from $300bn in April<\/a> and $157bn last October<\/a>. Anthropic almost trebled its valuation recently, going from $60bn in March to $170bn last month.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think one needs to be honest that those sudden increases [in valuation] that people were willing to place on OpenAI, Anthropic and the like were disconcerting,\u201d he said. \u201cThat scale of jump and the pace with which it happened did bother me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anderson also raised concerns about Nvidia\u2019s investment of up to $100bn in OpenAI<\/a>. Nvidia is a key player in AI infrastructure as a maker of the computer chips that are used in training and operating AI models, a position that has driven it to a stock market valuation of $4.5tn. Under the terms of the deal, OpenAI will pay Nvidia in cash for chips, and Nvidia will invest in OpenAI for non-controlling shares.<\/p>\n

Some commentary around the deal has raised parallels with vendor financing, where a company provides financial support to a customer buying its products.<\/p>\n

Anderson said he was a \u201chuge admirer\u201d of Nvidia<\/a> but the OpenAI deal presented \u201cmore reason to be concerned there than before\u201d.<\/p>\n

Referring to a practice common in the turn-of-the-millennium dotcom bubble<\/a>, when telecom equipment makers lent money to customers, he said: \u201cI have to say the words \u2018vendor financing\u2019 do not carry nice reflections to somebody of my age.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not quite like what many of the telecom suppliers were up to in 1999-2000 but it has certain rhymes to it. I don\u2019t think it makes me feel entirely comfortable from that point of view.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anderson is the managing partner of Lingotto\u2019s innovation strategy fund. Lingotto is owned by Exor, the holding company of the Italian Agnelli family, which holds investments in Ferrari, Juventus FC and the Economist.<\/p>\n

Nvidia and OpenAI were approached for comment.<\/p>\n

Some investors are also concerned that stock market valuations may be approaching bubble territory, driven by enthusiasm over AI.<\/p>\n

Wolf von Rotberg, an equity strategist at J Safra Sarasin Sustainable Asset Management, warned on Tuesday that US equities looked \u201cincreasingly bubbly\u201d, having rallied strongly from their lows in April after Donald Trump launched his trade war.<\/p>\n

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\u201cMuch of the rebound has come on the back of a very favourable narrative around AI and a corresponding ramp-up of investment spending. While there is no clear definition of a bubble, parallels to previous periods of exuberance can be drawn.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cCurrent valuations are not too far off the dot-com highs in the early 2000s. Similarly, credit markets are trading at risk spreads that are close to the lows over the past 25 years,\u201d said von Rotberg.<\/p>\n

The City consultancy Capital Economics said the rally had further to run, though. \u201cIt\u2019s hardly surprising there is renewed talk of a stock market bubble in the US with the S&P 500 back near a record high.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven so, we wouldn\u2019t be surprised if the index ended this year above our current forecast of 6,750 and made further gains in 2026 as the hype around AI continued to build,\u201d it told clients this week.<\/p>\n

The Deutsche Bank Research Institute has said that the number of web searches for \u201cAI bubble\u201d has plummeted in the past month, according to Google Trends.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne AI bubble has already burst \u2013 the bubble in saying there\u2019s a bubble,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A leading British tech investor has described soaring valuations of artificial intelligence companies as \u201cdisconcerting\u201d, amid concerns of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":182672,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-182671","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182671\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/182672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}