The AI bubble talk is coming from inside the earnings calls

• The phrase "AI bubble" has recently been in the zeitgeist.
• Mentions in earnings calls and investor conference transcripts increased 740% from last quarter.
• Only demonstrable profits will quiet the talk, analyst Gil Luria told BI.

There's a bubble in talk of an "AI bubble."

The phrase "AI bubble" appeared in 42 earnings calls and investor conference transcripts between October and December — a 740% increase from the previous quarter, according to an AlphaSense analysis.

In the third quarter of 2025, five transcripts mentioned the term. The quarter before that, four. For all of 2024, executives and analysts used the phrase in 24 transcripts total. In 2023, it was nine. (The analysis counted transcripts where "AI" and "bubble" appeared within five words of each other.)

Now dozens of companies across semiconductors, cloud infrastructure, financial services, and industrials are fielding some version of the same question: Is the AI boom a bubble?

At UBS's Global Technology and AI Conference on December 2, AMD CEO Lisa Su told investors, "from the standpoint of, you know, do we see a bubble? We don't see a bubble."

Nvidia CFO Colette Kress similarly swatted the premise aside, describing it onstage as a "supposed AI bubble."

Her boss, CEO Jensen Huang, said as much in Nvidia's November earnings call. "There's been a lot of talk about an AI bubble," he said. "From our vantage point, we see something very different."

Aixtron, a German semiconductor-equipment maker, was asked in its November earnings call whether customers might slow capacity plans if AI enthusiasm wanes. Coface, a Paris-based credit insurer, described re-running the math on big AI-related capital requests to ensure they hold up even if "bubble-type enthusiasm" fades.

So why the sudden spike?

Analysts pointed to the sheer scale of the numbers being tossed around.

"We've been seeing these huge partnerships and people throwing out money amounts for infrastructure — like trillions of dollars — which I can't remember ever hearing before," Sarah Hoffman, director of AI thought leadership at AlphaSense, told Business Insider. That gap between the trillions being invested and the billions in revenue from many AI efforts, she said, "is what's getting people a little bit freaked out."

Gil Luria, managing director and head of technology research at DA Davidson, said analysts and CEOs are voicing anxieties they're already hearing from investors.

Luria pointed to what he called "circular transactions" as one source of anxiety. "Nvidia investing a dollar in CoreWeave, CoreWeave borrows nine, and uses eight of them to buy Nvidia chips," he said. "That's the echoes of bubbles past."

The past eight weeks have given bubble proponents plenty of ammunition.

Tech luminaries, including Sam Altman and Bill Gates, have said there's some froth in AI spending. In earnings calls this quarter, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon all said they planned to increase their spending on data centers that are the backbone of AI. Michael Burry, whose bet against the housing market was made famous in "The Big Short," made headlines after he said he had shorted Nvidia, the world's most valuable company.

While executives have pushed back on skeptics, Luria said that only cash will quiet the conversation.

"There's nothing they can say that will change people's perception of whether or not there's a bubble," he said. "The only thing they can do is show results, and those have to be financial results."