Bezos compares AI investment surge to internet bubble at Italian Tech Week

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos cautioned against viewing the current artificial intelligence investment boom as entirely unprecedented while acknowledging similarities to previous technology bubbles during a conversation with Stellantis chairman John Elkann at Italian Tech Week 2025 in Turin on October 1.

The discussion took place at OGR Torino before 15,000 attendees, marking Bezos’ return to the Italian technology conference since 2017. Bezos directly addressed market dynamics during what he characterized as an “industrial bubble” around AI technology, drawing explicit comparisons to the internet bubble of 2000.

“In the year 2000 when the internet bubble burst, Amazon’s stock in a very short period of time went from $113 a share to $6 a share,” Bezos stated. The dramatic stock price collapse occurred while fundamental business metrics continued improving. “Every month as the stock price went from 113 to six, the number of customers went up every month. Our gross profits went up every month. Our operating expense, we were still in a loss position, but our losses as a percentage of sales went down every month. Every single business metric, new customers, customer repeat purchases, everything that we were monitoring through that entire period kept getting better,” he explained.

Bezos distinguished between market valuations and underlying business fundamentals, emphasizing that bubbles can disconnect stock prices from operational reality. “That’s one observation about bubbles in general. The fundamentals can be disconnected. The fundamentals of the business and of course as entrepreneurs, you’re focused on the fundamentals of the business. The stock price is an output, an ultimate output that you actually have very little control over,” he noted.

He referenced investor Benjamin Graham’s market wisdom. “Benjamin Graham the great investor is famous for saying in the short term the stock market is a voting machine in the long term it’s a weighing machine and so as founders and entrepreneurs and business people our job is to build a heavy company we want to build a company that when it is weighed it is a very heavy company,” Bezos stated.

The conversation occurred amid significant AI infrastructure investments by major technology companies. Recent data shows Meta announced hundreds of billions in AI infrastructure spending in July 2025, while the combined 2025 capital expenditure across major tech firms represents a 46% increase from 2024’s $223 billion. Yale research published in October 2024 identified concerning parallels between current AI market dynamics and past technology bubbles.

Bezos acknowledged pattern similarities between current AI investment and historical bubbles. “The second thing that happens when people get very excited as they are today about artificial intelligence for example is every experiment gets funded. Every company gets funded. The good ideas and the bad ideas. And investors have a hard time in the middle of this excitement distinguishing between the good ideas and the bad ideas. And so that’s also probably happening today,” he said.

The Amazon founder emphasized that market speculation does not negate technological legitimacy. “But it doesn’t mean that anything that’s happening isn’t real. Like AI is real and it is going to change every industry. In fact, it’s a very unusual technology in that regard in that it’s a horizontal enabling layer,” he stated.

Bezos drew distinctions between contemporary AI companies and future applications. “Today we talk about AI first companies like OpenAI and Anthropic and Mestral and so on and so on and so on. There are so many startup companies that are kind of AI companies of various kinds and that’s normal for this phase. But that is not the biggest impact that AI is going to have. The biggest impact that AI is going to have is it is going to affect every company in the world. It is going to make their quality go up and their productivity go up,” he explained.

He continued with specific examples. “I mean by every company I literally mean every company. Every manufacturing company, every hotel, every you know consumer products company etc etc etc. And so that is hard to fathom but it’s real. There is no doubt. We don’t know how long it will take exactly. We don’t know how quickly that transition will occur and it’ll probably occur at different rates in different industries. But that is very real,” Bezos stated.

Bezos characterized AI developments as an “industrial bubble” rather than a financial bubble, drawing distinctions between categories. “The great thing about industrial bubbles, this is a kind of industrial bubble as opposed to financial bubbles and I’ll tell you what I mean by that. If you go back like the 90s had a biotech bubble and there were a bunch of pharma startup companies that were designing drugs and using new techniques and the world got very excited. The investment world got very excited as a group. They all lost money but we did get a couple of life-saving drugs,” he recounted.

He contrasted this with purely financial bubbles. “A bubble like a banking bubble the crisis in the banking system that’s just bad. That’s like 2008. And so that’s you those bubbles society wants to avoid. The ones that are industrial are not nearly as bad. They could even be good because when the dust settles and you see who are the winners, society benefits from those inventions. They still get those life-saving drugs. And that’s what’s going to happen here, too. This is real. The benefits to society from AI are going to be gigantic,” he stated.

The internet bubble comparison extended to infrastructure investments. “If we go back 25 years ago when when the internet was in that bubbish moment, no one would have predicted a lot of the industrial benefits,” Bezos recalled. He highlighted the fiber optic infrastructure legacy. “That industrial bubble and the fiber huge investment were put in infrastructure. It’s a perfect example that all of that fiber optic cable that got laid and by the way the companies who laid all that cable went out of business literally went bankrupt but the fiber optic cable was still there and we got to use it,” he explained.

Bezos identified multiple technologies experiencing simultaneous advancement. “We’re gifted to live in a moment of time when there are multiple golden ages going on. So you have space travel is in the middle of a golden age. AI and AI is several different things, by the way. Middle of a golden age. Robotics, middle of a golden age,” he stated.

The Amazon founder emphasized entrepreneurial advantages during periods of rapid change. “Stability favors incumbents and rapid change favors small, dynamic, nimble startup companies. And so the world is so rapidly changing right now. There has never been a better moment to be an entrepreneur,” he declared.

Bezos addressed startup company advantages during market turbulence. Small companies thrive when technologies shift rapidly because incumbents face disruption while startups can adapt quickly, he explained. “There has never been a better moment to be a startup company,” he added.

The conversation covered entrepreneurial preparation, with Bezos recommending corporate experience before founding companies. “It is possible to you know be 18 19 20 years old drop out of college and be a great entrepreneur and the world is we have famous examples of that working Bill Gates Mark Zuckerberg etc. But these people are the exception. I always advise to young people, you know, go work at a best practices company somewhere where you can learn a lot of basic fundamental things. How to hire really well, how to interview, etc. There’s a lot of stuff you would learn in a in a great company that will help you,” he stated.

Bezos added personal context. “And then you can still there’s still lots of time to start a company after you have absorbed it. Increases your odds in my opinion I started Amazon when I was 30. Not when I was 20 and I think that that extra 10 years of experience actually improved the odds that Amazon would succeed. So that would always be my advice and I finished college and I enjoyed college and I think it’s been helpful to me. And then I went on and I worked for I worked for a really great company called De Shaw where I learned a tremendous amount tremendous amount there,” he explained.

Elkann reflected on the balance between working for established companies and entrepreneurship. “If I look at my own experience luckily I did not drop out from college and start my own company when I was studying engineering here and I ended up working for a very large company back then which was General Electric where I did learn how to work where I had colleagues from many different places who had a lot to teach me,” he stated, describing his experience at GE’s Corporate Audit program from 2000 to 2002.

Bezos emphasized customer-focused strategy development for long-term success. “If you think long term it forces you to think what are the points of stability what is not going to change and one of the things that changes very slowly is customer needs. And so you can build a strategy around customer needs that will have durability. It will be durable in time,” he explained.

He provided Amazon-specific examples. “So an example at Amazon is that customers like fast deliveries. And so you could you’d be you would never expect to 10 years from now it would be impossible to imagine a customer saying I love Amazon. I just wish you delivered a little more slowly. Or I love Amazon. I just wish your prices were a little higher or and at Blue Origin, I love your rockets, but I just wish they were a little less reliable or and so you can these ideas, these big ideas that are customer-based. They start with the customer. It’s an idea that is in the customer’s brain. Those are the ones because human nature doesn’t change rapidly,” he stated.

Bezos emphasized strategic flexibility paired with directional consistency. “I always say be stubborn on the vision and flexible on the details and you have to be because the world is changing and you change your mind. I’ve noticed that people who are right a lot change their mind a lot. People who are wrong a lot are very stubborn on the details,” he observed.

The discussion touched on invention management within organizations. Bezos recounted feedback from early Amazon executive Jeff Wilkey. “One day in the early days because I literally put me in front of a whiteboard and I can come up with a hundred ideas in half an hour. And early in Amazon’s history, Jeff Wilkey came to me one day. He worked for Amazon for a quarter of a century. But this is when he probably knew me only for a year. And he said, ‘Jeff, you have enough ideas to destroy Amazon,'” Bezos recalled.

He continued the anecdote. “And this was such a shocking idea for me. And I as a founder I had the great luxury of always being able to hire my tutors they would hire these experienced senior executives brilliant people like Diego and Jeff Wilkey and there were several others too and I would listen to them and they would teach me and Jeff said you have enough ideas per minute per day per week to destroy Amazon I was like what do you what do you mean he’s you have to release the work at the right rate that the organization can accept it,” Bezos explained.

Bezos described the manufacturing perspective. “And he was a manufacturing expert. And so, you know, his view of the world was every time I released an idea, I was creating a backlog, a queue, work in process. And because it was just stacking up, it was adding no value. And in fact, it was creating distraction. And so he said, ‘Look, you have to figure out when to release these new ideas at a rate that the organization can accept them.’ And this was I mean this sounds so obvious but it was not obvious at the time to me and this was a profound insight for me,” he stated.

Bezos explained organizational evolution. “And so I started prioritizing the ideas better, keeping lists of them, keeping them to myself until the organization was ready for the ideas. And then I also started figuring out how can I build an organization that can be ready for more ideas. That’s about having the right senior team and the right leadership and getting those people the executive bandwidth so they could do more ideas per unit time. And so and that is what we built. We built a company that’s very good at inventing and doing more than one thing at a time,” he noted.

Blue Origin developments featured prominently in the conversation. “I am working very hard on Blue Origin. I’m working very hard on AI. I’m the least retired person in the world and I will never retire because work is too much fun. It will never happen,” Bezos stated when Elkann asked about his current focus.

He announced the New Glenn vehicle launch. “At the end of this month or maybe the first week of November, we’re going to launch our New Glenn vehicle and we’re sending NASA’s Escapade satellite into orbit around Mars. So, that’s about to happen,” Bezos revealed. He continued detailing lunar ambitions. “We are building a lunar lander that is going to land on the moon here in just a few years. And also very exciting, it’s hydrogen powered. It we developed being 20 degree Kelvin very very cold 20 degrees above absolute zero 20 Kelvin electric powered solar powered cryocoolers so that we can keep liquid hydrogen liquid and have it be a storeable propellant in space,” he explained.

Bezos addressed technical challenges in hydrogen propulsion. “This is very hard to do. We already have made amazing progress on it because hydrogen is the highest performing fuel for rocketry for space travel. But it has this problem that it has to be kept so cold that historically hasn’t been able to been used on deep space missions because it just boils away. So we’re solving that problem making hydrogen a storeable fuel,” he stated.

The discussion extended to lunar resource utilization. “We’re we are doing R&D into how to build solar cells solar cells from lunar regolith on the surface of the moon. Because if you’re going to go to the moon and stay on the moon, you need to be using the resources of the moon. You need to be harvesting the moon to make that cost effective,” Bezos explained.

He emphasized the moon’s strategic importance. “So the moon will be a launch pad. The moon is a gift from the universe. It’s so close to Earth. It’s only three and a half days away. We have we can launch and get to the moon anytime. Unfortunately to get to other planetary bodies, they have very rare launch windows. Mars. You can go to Mars once every 26 months or so. And so the moon is really a gift. And it has a very low gravitational field, only a sixth of Earth’s, which means it takes about 30 times less energy to lift a kilogram of mass off the moon than it does to lift it off the Earth. So we can use the moon as a rocket fuel depot to go to the rest of the solar system,” he stated.

Bezos predicted millions of people living in space within decades. “One of the things that’s going to happen in the next, it’s hard to know exactly when. It’s 10 plus years, but I bet it’s not more than 20 years. We’re going to start building these giant gigawatt data centers in space. So, these giant training clusters, those will be better built in space because we have solar power there 24/7. And it’s and the solar power there is there no clouds and no rain, no weather. So you can build we will be it will we will be able to beat the cost of terrestrial data centers in space in the next couple of decades,” he stated.

He continued on space infrastructure applications. “And so space will end up being one of the places that keeps making earth better. It already has happened with weather satellites. It’s already happened with communication satellites. The next step is going to be data centers and then other kinds of manufacturing,” Bezos added.

When asked about millions living in space, Bezos confirmed the timeline. “I think I believe we’ll have in you know in the next kind of couple of decades I believe there will be millions of people living in space. That’s how fast this is going to accelerate. It’s interesting too because they’ll mostly be living there because they want to. Our robotic technology is getting so good. We don’t need people to live in space. Anything that could that we need done, if you need to do some work on the surface of the moon or anywhere else, we can we will be able to send robots to do that work and that will be much more cost effective than sending humans,” he stated.

The discussion touched on personal influences. Elkann drew parallels between their grandparents’ influence on their careers. He recounted his grandfather’s impact. “One of one of the similitudes that Jeff and I have is we have had the fortune of having a very loving family and among a loving family we had very strong relationships with our grandparents and particularly we had grandfathers who had a big influence in in what we we did,” Elkann stated.

Bezos shared a formative childhood lesson. “My mother had me when she was very young. She was she had she was she had just turned 17 years old. She was still in high school in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In fact, they tried to kick her out of high school for being pregnant. And my grandfather said, ‘No, you can’t kick her out. It’s a public school. She gets to finish high school.’ So anyway, there she was pregnant with me in high school and finishing in her whole senior year after I was born,” he recounted.

He described summers spent on his grandfather’s ranch. “And because she was so young, my grandparents took me every summer to so that she could have, you know, some other kind of life for a few months. Not she was you know when you are a very very young mother you grow up very fast and so every summer from the age of three or four until I was about 16 I went and spent with my grandparents on their ranch in South Texas,” Bezos explained.

Bezos recounted his grandfather’s resourcefulness. “My grandfather at that point so I only knew him as a rancher he had done a bunch of things in his life but at that point he was a rancher and he did and this is quite common I think in rural areas that people do everything themselves. He did his own veterinary work. He repaired everything. He had this D6 Caterpillar bulldozer that was he bought for like $5,000 because it was completely broken down. And we spent an entire summer fixing it. And to get the transmission out of the thing, we had to build our own crane,” he stated.

He reflected on the lesson’s impact. “And so he had an incredible resourcefulness to him. You know, he had he believed he could solve any problem. And I sort of watched him, you know, his veterinary work on the cattle. He would make his own needles. He would get a little piece of wire and heat it up with a blowtorch and pound it flat and then sharpen it and drill a little hole through it. Some of the cattle even survived,” Bezos recounted, prompting laughter from the audience.

Bezos shared a pivotal childhood moment about kindness. “I thought I was a very smart little kid. I was very confident and this I’m only at this point maybe 10 years old. And this was, you know, this would have been 1974 and there were a lot of radio commercials on the car radio about how smoking cigarettes kills you. This was 10 years after the US surgeon general’s warning and it was still like there was big campaigns to get people to stop smoking,” he explained.

He continued the story. “And one of these radio commercials said, ‘Every puff on a cigarette takes two minutes off of your life.’ And my grandmother was a chain smoker. She smoked all day long. And so always when we were in the car, she would have the window down and she’d be smoking the whole time. And I hated this. I thought it was smelled bad and I didn’t like it. And I was listening to these radio commercials. And so I decided I would calculate how many years of her life she had taken off by if every puff is two minutes. And I did some estimating and I stood up in a back of the car and I proudly announced that she had taken I don’t remember what the number was, let’s say seven years off of her life,” Bezos stated.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Stellantis chairman John Elkann engaged in a public conversation before 15,000 attendees at Italian Tech Week 2025.

What: Bezos compared current AI investment patterns to the 2000 internet bubble, acknowledging similarities while emphasizing fundamental differences between market valuations and technology’s societal benefits. He characterized AI as an “industrial bubble” that will produce lasting innovations despite potential investor losses.

When: The conversation took place on October 1, 2025, at OGR Torino during Italian Tech Week 2025, marking Bezos’ return to the Italian technology conference since 2017.

Where: The discussion occurred in Turin, Italy, at the annual Italian Tech Week conference founded in 2018, which has grown from 100 initial attendees to 15,000 participants constrained only by venue capacity.

Why: The conversation addressed entrepreneur concerns about current AI investment levels and market dynamics while providing perspective from Bezos’ experience navigating the internet bubble at Amazon. The discussion aimed to distinguish between temporary market fluctuations and fundamental technological transformation affecting industries globally.