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The last time capital flooded into technology at the pace we’re seeing today, the Nasdaq lost 78% of its value. It didn’t recover for 15 years.
That was the Dot Com Boom. This is the AI Boom. And right now, it looks identical.
Nvidia (NVDA) is minting money. Jensen Huang believes Blackwell chips are a “one-trillion-dollar” opportunity. Broadcom (AVGO) and Marvell (MRVL) are printing records. Oracle (ORCL) just reported $553 billion in remaining performance obligations. The hyperscalers — Amazon (AMZN), Microsoft (MSFT), Alphabet (GOOGL), Meta (META) — are spending more than half a trillion dollars this year alone on AI infrastructure. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are eyeing $1 trillion IPOs. SpaceX is approaching a $2 trillion IPO.
This boom is unstoppable. Generational.
That’s what they said in 1999, too.
The smart money is already asking: what ends the AI Boom, and how much time do we have?
We think we know the answer. And the clock is ticking.
The Real Risk to the AI Boom
The force that will derail the AI Boom is not a technological failure, demand collapse, or even a recession.
It is politics — specifically, a populist backlash against AI that is already building momentum, fueled by the growing economic pain hitting American households right now. And it’s on a trajectory to reach full force right around the 2028 presidential election cycle.
The evidence is already stacking up in ways that are hard to ignore.
Rising Energy Costs Are Fueling the AI Backlash
Every time a hyperscaler announces another gigawatt of data center capacity, somewhere in America, a family’s electricity bill goes up.
A found that Georgia Power — the state’s largest utility — imposed six rate hikes in just three years. The average monthly bill jumped 50%. And this is not just a Georgia problem. According to a Bloomberg analysis, Americans living near data centers are paying as much as 267% more per month for electricity than they were five years ago. This is now affecting at least 13 states — and spreading.
The AI infrastructure buildout requires staggering amounts of power. A single large data center can consume as much electricity as a small city. The companies building them — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta — negotiate discounted power rates with utilities. Residential customers make up the difference. The woman CBS News interviewed in Atlanta is now living in a ski suit inside her own home because she can’t afford heating — all because she’s forced to subsidize data center customers.
That story has a face now. And faces win elections.
Public Opinion Is Turning Against AI
also tells a story the industry doesn’t want to hear.
Among American adults, those concerned about AI outnumber those excited by 5 to 1. And concern has been rising steadily since 2021.
The numbers get even worse when you focus on specific applications. Only 23% of Americans believe AI will have a positive impact on how people do their jobs. Only 24% think it will be good for education. More than half say AI will worsen people’s ability to think creatively and form meaningful relationships. And — critically — more than half of Americans say they want more control over AI in their lives.
That last data point is like a pre-written mandate for regulation. Any politician who runs on “you should be in charge of this technology, not them” will already have majority support before they’ve said another word. And a cross-the-aisle convergence makes this doubly dangerous for the AI industry: Republicans and Democrats are now equally concerned about AI in daily life.
This is a bipartisan pressure cooker.
AI-Driven Layoffs Are Accelerating
If rising energy costs are a slow burn, the layoffs are an accelerant.
The AI-driven job cut announcements of the past 12 months have been extraordinary — not just in scale, but in the brazenness with which executives are attributing them directly to artificial intelligence:
- Block (XYZ) CEO Jack Dorsey cut 40% of the company’s workforce (4,000 people) in February 2026. His justification? “Intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company.”
- Amazon eliminated 14,000 corporate jobs — the largest layoff in the company’s history — with AI explicitly cited as enabling “leaner structures and faster innovation.”
- Meta cut 8,000 jobs in April 2026, on top of the 25,000 already eliminated since 2022.
- Oracle has erased up to 30,000 positions.
- Salesforce (CRM) dismissed 4,000 customer support roles, with CEO Marc Benioff declaring “I need less heads.”
In total, AI was explicitly cited for nearly 55,000 U.S. layoffs in 2025 alone — out of a total 1.17 million job cuts, the highest since the pandemic. In 2026, the pace has accelerated to over 860 tech layoffs per day.
Meta Shows How the Narrative Is Forming
No single company compressed the anti-AI narrative into a tighter window than Meta did over three weeks this spring.
In early March, Mark Zuckerberg purchased a $170 million mansion on Miami’s “Billionaire Bunker” — Indian Creek Island, a private, guarded enclave with its own 24-hour armed marine patrol, a few doors down from Jeff Bezos. It set the all-time record for the most expensive home sale in Miami-Dade County history.
In late April, Meta announced it would lay off 10% of its workforce — 8,000 people — starting May 20.
Then in the same week, , which installs tracking software on all U.S. employees’ work computers, recording their mouse movements, keystrokes, clicks, and periodic screenshots. The purpose: to harvest their behavioral data to train AI agents designed to perform white-collar tasks autonomously. Workers cannot opt out. (Note: Meta’s European employees are exempt, because GDPR would require their explicit consent. American workers get no such protection.)
One bucket of Meta employees is being fired. A second is being surveilled — their daily work habits harvested as training data for the bots that will eventually replace them.
All this while the CEO and his peers are buying $170 million compounds on private islands with private police forces.
This is the story that will be told — in campaign ads, union halls, and congressional hearings — because it is true and devastating.
The 2028 Election Could Trigger AI Regulation
Add it all up, and the narrative nearly writes itself. The only question left is when it reaches Washington — and what happens to your portfolio when it does.
Over the next 12 to 18 months, the three pressure points — rising energy costs, accelerating layoffs, and widening wealth inequality — will continue to compound. Public concern about AI will keep rising. More states will see legislative battles over data center construction. And more CEOs will cite AI for why they’re cutting headcount.
We expect that by 2027, this is a dominant political narrative. Candidates in both parties — facing a presidential election year in 2028 — will begin incorporating anti-AI messaging into their platforms. The China counter-argument (“we can’t fall behind Beijing”) will likely provide some suppression, but it won’t be sufficient to contain what has become a kitchen-table economic issue for tens of millions of Americans.
In November 2028, some of those candidates win. In 2029, proposed legislation arrives: an AI tax, restrictions on data center construction, energy cost regulation, labor displacement provisions. The market prices this risk before the bills are even introduced. AI infrastructure stocks — which by then have had a spectacular multi-year run — begin to roll over.
That is the scenario that ends the AI Boom. And it is not a remote tail risk. It is the base case if current trajectories hold.
The Final Word
Make your money now.
The window for transformational wealth creation in this AI cycle is the next two to three years. The fundamental thesis — AI infrastructure buildout, semiconductor supercycle, power and cooling demand — remains intact and powerful.
But be clear-eyed about what’s to come.
Every boom creates its own backlash.
We know what could end this one. The question is what comes next.
The last phase of a boom is always about extraction.
Not just who builds the technology… but who controls the flow of money around it.
That’s why we’re tracking a separate story most investors haven’t connected yet — , and how it could determine how money actually moves in the next cycle.
If you want to get ahead of that shift, .
