Bloomberg News Senior Editor Chris Anstey compared the current AI investment cycle to the 1990s internet boom on the March 29, 2026 broadcast of Bloomberg This Weekend, identifying what he called a missing “secret sauce” in the AI revolution. Anstey was joined by hosts David Gura and Christina Ruffini for the discussion.
The conversation centered on whether AI’s current trajectory mirrors the internet’s path from infrastructure investment to widespread adoption. Anstey noted that the internet era benefited from rapidly falling hardware costs that democratized access, while AI’s compute requirements continue to push costs higher with each generation of models.
The comparison to the 1990s remains one of the most debated frameworks in technology investing. The dot-com era saw companies with minimal revenue attract multi-billion dollar valuations before a correction wiped out trillions in market value. Today’s AI leaders differ in that they generate real revenue, but the gap between compute costs and subscription income remains substantial at most AI companies.
Anstey suggested that the companies best positioned in the current cycle may be infrastructure providers — chip manufacturers and cloud platforms — rather than AI application companies, echoing a pattern from the internet era where Cisco and networking companies outperformed early web businesses.
