Ken Griffin Says AI Is 'Almost Certainly' in a Bubble—And Compares GPUs to Airline Seats

In brief

• Citadel founder Ken Griffin said Oct. 20 that investors are "almost certainly" in an AI bubble, but that companies surviving a bubble tend to lead markets for decades.
• He compared GPUs to airline seats, warning that a chip glut could send prices into freefall, as fiber-optic cable prices did after the telecom overbuild around 2000.
• Griffin said corporate buyers are weighing premium OpenAI and Anthropic models against cheaper open-source ones, which strains against the labs' spending.

Ken Griffin, founder of the Wall Street giant Citadel, said Tuesday that investors are “almost certainly” in an AI bubble—though he isn’t telling them to dump their AI stocks.

“What’s left in the wake of these bubbles, if we want to use that word, is often game changing for the world. And the companies that are on the other side of that bubble are the market leaders for decades to come,” Griffin said at Citadel’s Future of Global Markets Conference in New York on Oct. 20

This reaches beyond tech investors, since the AI buildout has underpinned equity markets over the past year, so many index funds and retirement accounts hold a slice of it. A bubble is what happens when prices climb far faster than the businesses behind them can justify, until reality catches up. Citadel is a hedge fund, a private firm that invests money for wealthy clients and institutions.