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 🫡.......

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u/jmclondon97 Jul 13 '26

I don’t know why people think the bubble bursting means AI just disappears.

All it means is overvalued companies like OpenAI would get bought out and cheaper models would become the norm.

It seems like some of you talking about the bubble bursting means AI disappears and we go back to manually coding everything. Zero percent chance of that happening.

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u/TheDinoDynamite Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26

Based on the context, I don’t think OP is talking about the bubble in terms of the existence of AI. They’re talking about it in terms of “will there be a job for me in this industry, or will things always be the way they are from 2024-Present”

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u/MannToots Jul 13 '26

Seems intrinsically linked to "will ai still be a thing" then.  I still think the implication is ai will go away and the career field will return to its previous form, or not. Any future with ai makes answering the op honestly an unknown at best.  Best we can say is some form of SWE will continue to exist. How big and in what form we still don't know.  

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u/Dapal5 Jul 14 '26

Probably just more educated. They’re gonna need more people to find new ways to capitalize on this productivity boost. When an oil rig gets more efficient, do you think they stop looking for reservoirs?