Bloomberg Surveillance · Tuesday, September 15, 2026
George Noble questioned the long-term profitability of AI investments, suggesting it could devolve into a low-margin commodity business. He highlighted the massive capital expenditures required and the challenge of generating sufficient gross profits and revenues to justify these investments, drawing parallels to the dot-com era where many companies failed despite growth in internet traffic.
“The question is, if you do reverse engineer the math and you look at the trillions we're spending on CapEx and just reverse engineer and say, okay, how much gross profits do they need to make to justify that? And in turn, what are the implied revenues that you need to justify that?”
“Liars figure, but figures don't lie. And so the question is, is there going to be an acceptable return on capital, all those trillions of dollars are being spent, or It's just going to be $ 100 billion TAM, and you're going to end up in a commodity business, and there's going to be no margins.”
“Didn't stop Nortel from going bankrupt and Global Crossover from going bankrupt. These are two different things.”