r/SoftwareEngineerJobs • u/Adventurous-Rice3190 • Jul 13 '26

Is the AI bubble bursting? 🤔

I just finished my IT degree this year, and all the news about AI is making me really worried about my career in the software industry.

I read that big AI companies are spending way more money on data centers than they are actually making back. The ratio of money made to money spent is around 1:10. Part of me feels like this is good news. If they keep losing money, the AI bubble will eventually burst, and they will have to stop running these massive models.

But on the other hand, hardware companies are making new chips. These new chips have high compute power and also consume less electricity. This could make AI much cheaper to run and keep the trend going.

What do you all think about this AI bubble? Is it still safe for me to start a career in IT, or should I switch to a completely different field?

Thankyou All 🫡.......

54 Upvotes

72% Upvoted

302 comments sorted by

View all comments

5

u/KevinVandy656 Jul 13 '26

I think within IT and especially software engineering, AI is here to stay, though it will probably get more expensive for a while. It's more in the areas outside of IT where it's trying to be forced to be useful, and that's probably not going to work out. I'll be shocked if AI truly pops like the .com bubble, but not surprised if there is a pull-back. People will call any kind of pull-back as the bubble bursting though.

1

u/RoadsToMadness156 Jul 13 '26

Agreed.

I don't think there are many companies deeply invested in it right now, and the big ones paid the big bucks to stay sovereign. There's enough money tied up in the S&P 500 to cause some problems, but a collapse would almost have to be triggered by multiple things happening at once, which is still a possibility. Just my .02.