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August 2026 has been packed with hot AI news, including chipmaker Nvidia teaming up with some of the biggest names on Wall Street. Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Blackstone and others are helping it set up financing platforms. The plan is to bring in more than US$500 billion (HK$3.9 trillion) from outside investors to pay for AI data centers and chips. Nvidia itself might cover up to 25 percent of some deals. The idea is simple: treat the chips like assets that earn money, so companies can lease them instead of buying everything outright.
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Meanwhile, AI company Anthropic is targeting a valuation of about US$2 trillion or more when the company goes public, maybe as soon as October – bigger than SpaceX. Anthropic's sales are climbing fast. It brought in about US$11 billion in the second quarter alone. Investors think the annual run rate could hit US$100 billion to US$120 billion by the end of the year.
Then there is DeepSeek. The Chinese lab just put out a new version of its V4 Pro model. On many important tests it comes very close to Anthropic's Claude Fable 5, and in a few cases it even matches or beats it. The big difference is price. DeepSeek costs a tiny fraction of what Fable charges.
All of this shows how intense the AI race has become. The technology is improving quickly and getting cheaper while companies are spending enormous amounts of money because they believe AI will change almost every industry. Real revenue is coming in, not just promises.
Still, the numbers look stretched. A US$2 trillion price tag assumes growth keeps going at this crazy pace for years. Nvidia helping customers buy more of its own chips has people worried about circular deals. We have seen big infrastructure spending get ahead of profits before, like with telecom networks in the 1990s.
So is this an AI bubble? AI works, and businesses are paying for it. But some of the excitement has almost certainly gone too far. The question is whether the prices people are paying today already count on a perfect future that might take longer to arrive.
Allen Au is a tech startup founder, AI architect, and YouTuber