Ken Griffin says AI is ‘almost certainly’ a bubble, but he’s still a believer

Ken Griffin thinks the AI trade has gotten ahead of itself. He also thinks AI is going to change everything. The Citadel founder and CEO told an audience in New York on October 20, 2026, that investors are “almost certainly” caught in an AI bubble. In the same breath, he made the case that the technology could usher in a golden era for entrepreneurs. What Griffin actually said The remarks came during a talk at Citadel’s annual Future of Global Markets Conference. Citadel estimates it manages approximately $68 billion in assets, so his read on market sentiment tends to travel. His core worry was not that AI is useless. It was that companies are spending heavily and struggling to show what they got for it. Griffin described corporations taking a hard look at their AI bills, including invoices from providers like Anthropic and OpenAI. Many of those businesses are finding it difficult to point to clear productivity gains from the money they have spent. Griffin noted that companies are wrestling with both the steep cost of AI and the uncertain timeline for any return on investment. That tension shows up most clearly in infrastructure spending. US data center spending linked to AI is pro...