AI Race 2026: Money Is Flowing, But the Bubble Question Remains Open 📈

Q3 2025 showed a significant shift: AI has stopped being just a 'trendy expense' and real revenue is now coming in from industry leaders.

💡 Who's Ahead:

• Microsoft Azure: ~$18.5 billion annual AI revenue. Sales of AI services have doubled in a year and quadrupled since early 2024.

• OpenAI: ~$13 billion in revenue, growth of more than 4 times in one and a half years.

📉 Who's Falling Behind:

• xAI and Nebius (Elon Musk): revenue < $1 billion per year. Hardware is purchased, capacity is available, but monetization is lagging.

🌍 Key Market Problem:

The gap between investments in data centers and actual revenue (revenue gap) remains large. It's precisely this gap that fuels the talk about a bubble.

If current trends continue, OpenAI could smoothly approach an IPO with an estimated valuation of ~$830 billion.

What do you think—has the AI cycle already peaked, or is it just reaching break-even?

📈 – the beginning of a long-term growth

📉 – the bubble is about to burst