Here’s a genuinely contrarian position for mid-2026: the bubble bears are wrong. With Burry, Dalio and half of fintwit screaming “1999,” the actual against-the-grain take is to defend the trade. So — steelman time. What’s the strongest version of the bull case, from voices credible enough to take seriously?
Dan Ives: it’s an “air pocket,” not a top
Wedbush’s Dan Ives has been the loudest bull on the Street, and his argument is coherent: we’re in year three of a decade-long supercycle, not the end of one. He characterizes the current weakness as a six-to-twelve-month “air pocket” while hyperscalers spend into a monetization boom that hasn’t landed yet — comparing the buildout to “building the Las Vegas strip in the 1950s.” Take his book with the appropriate salt (he’s structurally bullish, and he left Wedbush on July 1 to launch an AI-focused merchant bank). But “the revenue lags the capex by a couple years” is not a crazy thing to believe about infrastructure.
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The Jevons paradox counter-punch
The bears’ favorite stat — “AI is too expensive to ever pay off” — runs straight into a 160-year-old economics observation. The Jevons paradox says that when you make a resource dramatically cheaper to use, total consumption goes up, not down. Satya Nadella invoked exactly this when cheap models like DeepSeek spooked the market: falling cost-per-token doesn’t shrink the AI market, it expands it, because suddenly a thousand use-cases that were uneconomical pencil out. If that’s right, today’s “nobody’s making money” looks less like a dead end and more like the dial-up phase.
Even the skeptics aren’t all-out bearish
Sequoia’s David Cahn — the guy who wrote the “$600 billion question” the bears love to quote — followed up with “A Tale of Two AIs,” a far more nuanced read than the doom clip suggests. The honest bull case isn’t “number go up forever.” It’s narrower and harder to dismiss: capex leads revenue in every infrastructure buildout; cheaper compute grows the market rather than shrinking it; and a handful of these companies will grow into valuations that look insane today. The bears might be right about the froth and still wrong about the timing — and in markets, timing is the whole game.
Not investment advice. Both sides of this argument are populated by smart, motivated people; weigh the incentives and decide for yourself.