Pranav Balakrishnan · · 10 min readTrouble is brewing in AI paradise
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What a month! October 2026 may be remembered as the end of the four-year AI bull run that began with ChatGPT’s launch.
The bubble hasn’t burst, but it is looking stretched. Since mid-month, AI infrastructure stocks like CoreWeave, IREN, Applied Digital, and Oracle have taken a beating.
Image credit: Made by Ulla/Tech in Asia with the help of AI
On Monday, Elon Musk predicted “guppy-level death and consolidation” among more than 200 neoclouds, saying debt markets were closed to companies without substantial revenue independent of AI data centers.
“Some will make it through, but not many,” he wrote on X, adding to the pressure on stocks.
Musk may be exaggerating, but his warning captures investors’ concern: Can demand for AI compute translate into reliable revenue, and can customers keep paying?
For infrastructure providers, the customers they sell to could matter as much as how much they sell. Long-term contracts with financially strong customers could determine who gets funded and who gets left behind.
Asia’s neoclouds have less of a public-market presence than their western peers, but they will be watching. Billions are going into data centers. Who are they being built for?
Smaller AI labs and startups may face larger upfront payments, tying up scarce compute capital. Providers will increasingly need creditworthy “anchor customers” to finance expansion. To sustain the buildout, banks and telecom companies still experimenting with AI may need to become committed buyers.
Meanwhile, Ben Goertzel, who helped popularize the term artificial general intelligence (AGI), told us in an exclusive interview that he worries more about humans using pre-AGI systems who could trigger World War III than about AGI itself.
And into this storm comes Anthropic, apparently convinced it is a great time to go public.
On Monday, it published its IPO papers with an explicit warning that AI poses “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.” In this issue, we explain what the listing could mean for Asia.
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