This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on November 6th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.
Worries about the AI market are shaking the world’s stock exchanges, and the pent-up fear of a bubble is spreading. This could be a healthy cleanout for the industry – but it could hit savings hard, here in Sweden too.
Blood red on the Nasdaq in the U.S., trading halted on South Korea’s Kospi, and the Stockholm stock exchange opening lower. Is this the moment? Has the air finally gone out of the inflated AI bubble so many have feared?
The signs are there – and they have been visible for quite some time.
People say stocks take the stairs up and the elevator down. Slow gains are balanced by steep drops. For the AI market, the staircase has been enormous – and steep. As the engine pulling the world’s exchanges, it has set record after record. This despite everyone having a feeling that perhaps not everything is quite right.
Nvidia’s stock has risen around 300 percent over the past three years, and more than 726,000 percent since the company went public. There is nothing normal about this.
Now that unease is showing up in the numbers as well. Nvidia – the spider in the AI web – is tightly interconnected with every other AI company. Sometimes in a slightly incestuous way, where it both finances companies and then sells them products with the same money it just invested. That leaves the AI industry especially exposed to turbulence of this kind. The companies are bound together – not just by a shared optimistic view of the future, but in many cases also through supplier relationships and cross-ownership.
Talk of a bubble suggests something that bursts and leaves nothing behind. A better metaphor for the situation, borrowed from the Swedish futurologist Magnus Lindkvist, is a balloon. It can pop, but it can also deflate – and sometimes be inflated again.
Looking back at the dotcom crash, there were balloon tendencies there too. Valuations of those companies were too high, and access to funding was choked off. Many of them died. But much of what the technology promised did materialize, if with some delay. So the whole balloon didn’t disappear. Yet many of the big names from that era have been forgotten.
What we are seeing right now may be the start of the same thing: a cleanout of the first generation of AI companies. Some of you reading this may remember the search company AltaVista? It dominated its category until a small upstart called Google came along. Now it has been consigned to history.
When we look back on this first AI wave, will the so-called neocloud companies CoreWeave and Nebius be something we remember? The ones that bought Nvidia’s chips with gigantic loans, only to rent them straight out to capacity-hungry AI firms? Probably not. Even the biggest players in the market – OpenAI and Anthropic – have no guaranteed place in the future. At this point they are as likely to become AltaVista as Google.
This purge is a healthy part of the market economy. When bubbles and balloons pop, they create fuel for the next wave of companies that follows. The newcomers learn from the mistakes of those that went under.
It would be about time for something like that. For a great many years we have had an enormous surplus of cheap money – with low interest rates – and an equally large shortage of good ideas to bet it on. Those are perfect conditions for bubbles, or balloons for that matter, to form. AI is the idea that has captured most of that money in recent years.
Even if the process is fundamentally sound, it can be painful while it lasts. The dotcom crash took many years to recover from, and it created a sentiment in the world economy that affected sectors that had nothing to do with technology. The same could happen this time. You don’t need to be an AI enthusiast – neither at work nor in your savings – to be hit when the blow comes. If it does, you are exposed through your pension, your funds and perhaps through your workplace too.
Markets all over the world are trembling now. The question to ask is not whether a bubble is bursting – but rather whether what we have in front of us is a bubble or a balloon. Will it leak a little, only to be pumped back up? Or will it pop?
The coming days will be decisive in giving us that answer.
