There isn’t just one AI bubble, strategist says — there’s a ‘rolling sequence of bubbles’ instead

The question of whether AI is a bubble is the wrong one, Dhaval Joshi argues.

The right question is: which AI bubble is popping today? Joshi, until recently the chief strategist for Counterpoint at London’s BCA Research, has been building a reputation for contrarian, structurally minded calls on the AI trade.

A week ago, he reframed the entire “is AI a bubble debate” itself, writing on LinkedIn .

Rather than your classic idea of one giant bubble building until it implodes, this is rather a rapid-fire sequence of bubbles popping and inflating in a rolling pattern.

Investors are misjudging, and then correcting, who or what will actually capture AI’s value.

One commenter, Artificial Genius President Paul Burchard, asked Joshi whether AI is like the infamous tulip bubble of the Netherlands in the 17th century.

After all, that bubble rolled through rare bulbs into tulip futures.

Joshi responded that the AI bubble is rolling through sectors beyond the proverbial tulip.

It would explain the “SaaSpocalypse” in the software-as-a-service sector, as well as volatility in silver and semiconductor stocks.

But is this just the market doing what it’s supposed to do, namely price discovery? The rolling hills of bubbles Joshi produced a chart showing that software stocks rallied on the idea that AI would be a productivity tool, then crashed as investors realized AI agents were threatening the SaaS subscription model itself.

“So, the software boom turned to bust.” Silver also had a boom and bust.

Prices spiked as the metal is seen as the best electrical conductor for power-hungry data centers: “On reassessment however, this could not justify a near trebling of the silver price when there are other good conductors.” Semiconductors then rose on the idea of seemingly limitless pricing power for chipmakers, but Joshi argued that investors are realizing that chipmakers don’t have “moats” around their profits.

He offered a prediction: “Astronomical margins will crash back to earth when demand and supply equilibrate, as they ultimately must.

So, the semis boom is unwinding – though has further to go.” In an interview with Fortune , Joshi said he slightly disagreed with his former colleague, BCA’s Peter Berezin, that the market is in an earnings bubble , calling it more of a “profit margin bubble” instead.