ALISHBA SOZAR

The AI Repricing Is Coming. Most Won’t Survive It.

Let me be direct: you’re late on AI stocks.

We’re not at the start of a new tech cycle, we’re already deep inside it. Gartner officially put generative AI in the trough of disillusionment last year. The average enterprise spent $1.9 million on GenAI in 2025, and fewer than 30% of CEOs said they were satisfied with the ROI. That’s a BIG warning.

Still, the market values these companies like every single one will win in the long run.

Do the math. The total market cap of AI‑related public companies sits around $21 to $23 trillion. To justify that at a 10% annual return, they’d need roughly $2.2 trillion in annual profit. Their current combined net income is closer to $420 billion, and most of it isn’t even from AI.

Investors are paying five times future profits that don’t exist, on a timeline nobody can model, in a sector where the unit economics are broken.

OpenAI, probably the most important AI company out there, spends about $1.69 for every $1 it makes. It’s projecting $14 billion in losses this year and $115 billion in cumulative losses before reaching profitability in 2029. The company is raising $100 billion at a valuation near $830 billion. That’s more than the GDP of Argentina for a business still losing money at a WeWork pace.

Meanwhile, hyperscalers are planning to pour $650 to $690 billion into AI capex this year. Amazon alone is spending $200 billion. The issue is simple: data centers commissioned in 2025 cost $40 billion a year in depreciation but generate only $15 to $20 billion in revenue at current utilization. That math doesn’t come close to working.

In Deutsche Bank’s global markets survey, 57% of investors said an AI valuation crash is the biggest risk heading into 2026. One of their strategists put it bluntly: “AI and tech bubble risk towers over everything else.”

This looks like the dot‑com era all over again, only with different letters. In 1999, adding “.com” to your name added billions in market cap overnight. Today, just mention “AI” on an earnings call and the same thing happens. The sentiment is identical. Morgan Stanley estimates retail investors have pushed about $700 billion into equities since January, five times faster than during the 2000 bubble.

The dot‑com bust didn’t prove the internet was wrong. It proved that valuations matter, and that picking winners is almost impossible until reality resets expectations. Cisco peaked at $555 billion in 2000 and took two decades to recover. Amazon, trading for pennies in 2001, quietly became a $2 trillion company.

That’s what I will be watching closely.

When the repricing hits, it will be brutal. AI‑only names with no moat or revenue will get crushed. The ones pitching 70 times forward sales on numbers that don’t exist will go to zero.

But what comes after is where the real upside lives. The survivors will be the companies with real ecosystems, sticky products, cash flow outside of AI, and the balance sheets to last. Think of the Amazons and Googles of this cycle. The infrastructure players that power the entire stack.

When the dust settles and real monetization starts, those survivors won’t just be worth hundreds of billions. They’ll be measured in trillions. The technology is transformational, just not as fast or as universally as the market assumes.

I’m not bearish on AI. I’m bearish on how certain people are about something that’s still uncertain.

Be patient. Let the cycle do what it always does. The real move is knowing which stocks to own once everyone else gives up.