Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, recently said in an interview with CNBC that the current artificial intelligence boom is "very similar" to the internet bubble at the end of the last century, but he emphasized that this wave is "not just hype." Gates pointed out that although most companies have not yet seen tangible benefits from artificial intelligence, they are still investing heavily in chips and data centers. He expects that some of these investments will eventually end in "costly failures."

Nevertheless, Gates still called artificial intelligence "the greatest technology I've seen in my life," and he believes its long-term economic potential is "huge and far-reaching." However, he also warned that the number of newly built data centers around the world is rising sharply, a trend that could significantly increase electricity costs, thereby putting pressure on energy supply and environmental sustainability.

Gates' views also echo the concerns of other industry leaders. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, AI pioneer Stuart Russell, and Meta's Chief Scientist Yann LeCun have all recently stated that if the public and capital markets have overly high expectations for artificial intelligence, and technological development fails to keep up, this AI boom might end up repeating the fate of the internet bubble.