Nick Clegg, Meta’s former president of global affairs, has warned that the current surge in AI investment could be heading toward a correction, comparing the situation to a market bubble. Speaking to CNBC, Clegg, who served as the UK’s deputy prime minister from 2010 to 2015 before joining Meta in 2018, said the AI sector displays clear signs of speculative excess. “There’s just an absolute sort of spasm of almost daily, hourly dealmaking,” Clegg said. “Of course, you have got to kind of think, ‘Oh wow, this could be headed for a correction.’” He highlighted the “unbelievable, crazy valuations” being assigned to AI startups and the massive influx of capital into the space. Clegg pointed to the enormous financial commitments companies are making—such as building sprawling data centers and securing multi-billion-dollar computing deals—as evidence of a potentially unsustainable trend. He emphasized that these investments require long-term, viable business models to justify the costs. “Companies will need to prove they can recoup that money,” he said. He also questioned whether current AI technology can deliver on the promise of superintelligence. “There are certain limits to that probabilistic AI technology,” Clegg noted, suggesting that the technology may not be capable of achieving the transformative breakthroughs some expect. Still, Clegg stressed that this doesn’t mean AI itself is a failure. “It doesn’t mean that the technology itself is not going to persist, and is not going to flourish, and is not going to have a huge effect,” he said. He added that the infrastructure being built for AI could find valuable use in other fields, even if AI’s ultimate potential falls short of hype. His comments come amid growing debate over whether the AI boom is a genuine technological revolution or a speculative bubble. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has argued it’s not a bubble, calling it instead the emergence of a new industrial era. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon took a more balanced view, saying while some AI ventures may be overvalued, the overall field is likely to deliver real, productive outcomes over time. “You’ve got to go one by one to say, ‘Is it pushing a bubble, or is it real?’” Dimon said.