The bubble hasn’t popped yet. Doesn’t mean it’s not popping.

Alright, so I’ve got to eat a little bit of crow here, and I’m fine with that.

A while back I was telling anyone who’d listen that this thing was going to blow this month. Full stop, done, mark the calendar. And now here we are, and it’s dragged on longer than I called it. Fair enough. I was wrong on the timing. But I want to be really clear about something, because I think people are going to use “it didn’t happen when Spin said it would” as some kind of proof that it’s not happening at all, and that’s not what’s going on here. It’s just taking a bit longer to get there. When it goes, it’s going in a big way.

I was reading through this piece from The Atlantic and honestly it just confirmed everything I’ve been saying, and gave me some numbers that made my stomach drop a bit, if I’m being honest with you.

The value of AI linked companies has climbed something like twenty seven trillion US dollars in the last three years. Twenty seven trillion. That’s not a typo. That’s roughly a third of the entire value of the US stock market sitting on top of one theme, one narrative, one bet that the returns are going to show up eventually and justify all of it. And to be fair, some really smart people at Goldman Sachs are on record saying that for those valuations to make sense, you basically need to assume best case scenario, everything goes right, nothing gets in the way. That’s not a forecast, mate, that’s a hope.

And here’s the bit that actually worries me more than the valuations themselves. It’s not just tech companies raising money from investors who can afford to lose it. It’s tech companies now propping each other up. Revenue flowing in circles between the same handful of players. You’ve got companies whose growth numbers depend on other AI companies buying their stuff, who in turn depend on the first mob buying theirs. That’s not organic demand, that’s a closed loop, and closed loops don’t hold forever.

Even the blokes at the centre of this whole thing are saying it out loud now. Altman’s basically said the quiet part himself, that investors are overexcited. When the guy running one of the biggest AI labs on the planet is telling you people have gotten ahead of themselves, that’s not a hot take anymore, that’s just where we’re at.

So why hasn’t it popped yet if all the ingredients are sitting right there. Because bubbles don’t pop on a schedule, they pop when the story stops being believable to enough people at the same time. Right now there’s still enough capital, enough momentum, enough fear of missing out keeping the whole thing propped up. Nobody wants to be the one who called the top too early and looked silly, so everyone keeps riding it a little longer than they probably should. I get it. I nearly did the same thing calling my own timeline.

But make no mistake, and I mean this, the fundamentals underneath this are not getting stronger while we wait. If anything they’re getting shakier. The IMF has flagged this as a genuine risk to financial stability, and when institutions like that start using words like tighter credit and disrupted trade flows, that’s not background noise, that’s a warning shot.

At the end of the day I still think this pops in a big way. I was wrong about when. I don’t think I’m wrong about what. And when it does go, it’s not going to be a slow leak, it’s going to be the kind of correction that reshapes who’s actually building something real versus who was just along for the ride on someone else’s story.

I’d rather be early and wrong on timing than right and caught flat footed. So I’m sticking with the call. Just moving the date.