Hello SaugaTech Community,
The festive season is truly upon us. Thanksgiving’s warmth has faded, Diwali’s lights have dimmed, and Halloween’s arrival this week reminds us that transitions happen—sometimes gradually, sometimes overnight. As we move from celebration to celebration, the tech world is experiencing its own season of transition, one where the question isn’t whether change is coming, but what shape it will take.
This week, we’re diving into a question that’s dominating conversations from Wall Street to Silicon Valley to the GTA: Are we in an AI bubble? And more importantly for our community: Does it even matter for us as tech professionals?
đź“‹ In This Edition:
🚀 First Things First: Why This Saturday’s Meetup Matters More Than Ever
💰 Tech in Focus: The $100 Billion Question - NVIDIA’s Circular Financing and AI Bubble Fears
📉 Historical Parallel: The Dot-Com Bubble - When the Bust Led to Ubiquity
💡 SaugaTech Epilogue: Why Bubbles Don’t Change What We Need to Do
🚀 First Things First: This Saturday - Practical AI Skills That Survive Any Market
Practical AI for Career Growth
Date: Saturday, October 25, 2025
Time: 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM (Gates open 12.30 pm)
Location: Touchdown Coworking Space, Bristol Circle, Oakville
Here’s why this Saturday’s session is more relevant than ever:
Whether we’re in an AI bubble or not—and spoiler alert, we probably are—the skills we’re covering aren’t going anywhere.
What We’re Covering This Saturday:
AI workflows for PMs: User research, User story writing, UX prototypes
AI workflows for Developers: Code generation, debugging, documentation automation
AI workflows for Program Managers: Project intelligence, risk assessment, stakeholder communications
RSVP: https://simpli.events/e/sauga-tech-meetups
⚡ Limited spots available
This isn’t about riding the hype wave. It’s about building skills that have staying power.
đź’° Tech in Focus: The $100 Billion Circle - Is AI a Bubble?
TL;DR: NVIDIA announced a $100 billion investment in OpenAI, which will use that money to buy NVIDIA chips. Similar circular deals across the AI ecosystem are raising serious questions about whether we’re witnessing the 2025 version of the dot-com bubble.
The Deal That Raised Red Flags
In late September 2025, NVIDIA announced it would invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI to fund data center buildouts. OpenAI, in turn, committed to purchasing millions of NVIDIA chips for those same data centers. Days later, OpenAI struck similar multibillion-dollar deals with AMD, Oracle, and Broadcom—representing more than $1.5 trillion in new spending.
The problem? Much of this looks like circular financing—companies giving money to their customers so those customers can turn around and spend it back with them.
The Pattern
NVIDIA’s investments:
$6.3 billion in CoreWeave, which has purchased ~$7.5 billion in NVIDIA GPUs
$1.5 billion in Lambda cloud capacity, buying NVIDIA chips
Now $100 billion into OpenAI, which will buy... NVIDIA chips
The broader ecosystem: Microsoft: 20% of NVIDIA’s revenue, major OpenAI investor, major CoreWeave customer. SoftBank: $3 billion stake in NVIDIA, partner in Stargate. The entire ecosystem is increasingly interconnected—and interdependent.
Echoes of the Dot-Com Era
Famed short-seller Jim Chanos noted that OpenAI is “selling itself off to a supplier in order to fund its investments.” Sound familiar? During the dot-com bubble, telecom equipment makers like Lucent Technologies and Nortel extended billions in loans to smaller carriers so those companies could buy their gear. On paper, revenues looked spectacular. In reality, vendors were financing their own sales. When the bubble burst, those companies collapsed.
The math problem: A Bain & Company report found AI companies will need $2 trillion of annual revenue by 2030 to fund projected infrastructure. Current trajectory? An $800 billion shortfall.
Yale professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and analysts across Wall Street point out what’s becoming obvious: the valuations don’t match the fundamentals. AI companies have accounted for 75% of S&P 500 returns, 80% of earnings growth, and 90% of capital spending since ChatGPT launched.
👉 Lesson: Whether this is a bubble or not, the AI infrastructure being built is real. Data centers are physical. Chips are tangible. The question isn’t whether AI will matter—it’s who will survive when the market rationalizes.
📉 The Dot-Com Lesson: When Destruction Led to Ubiquity
To understand where AI might be heading, look back at the internet’s near-death experience.
The Bubble and Collapse (1997-2002)
In the late 1990s, adding “.com” to your company name could double your stock price. Companies went public with zero revenue, prioritizing “Get Big Fast” over profitability. Fourteen dot-com companies paid $2M+ each for Super Bowl ads in January 2000—most were gone within months.
The crash: NASDAQ fell 78% from its March 2000 peak. $5 trillion evaporated. Hundreds of companies went bankrupt. 200,000 Silicon Valley jobs lost.
What Survived
The companies died, but the infrastructure survived. The technology won.
Winners emerged: Amazon and Google survived by focusing on sustainable business models, not hype
Infrastructure became cheap: Telecom overcapacity made high-speed internet affordable
Technology became ubiquitous: By 2010, the internet was everywhere, embedded in daily life
The lesson for AI: If the bubble bursts, many AI companies will fail. But the infrastructure (data centers, chips, training systems) remains. Companies with sustainable models will win. And AI will become embedded everywhere, regardless of today’s valuations.
👉 Lesson: Bubbles destroy companies, not technologies. The survivors of the 1840s railway mania built Victorian Britain. The survivors of the dot-com crash built the digital age. AI survivors will build what comes next.
✨ SaugaTech Epilogue: Skills Over Speculation
As Halloween approaches and we think about masks and transformations, here’s the truth for tech professionals: Focus on building real capabilities, not betting on market predictions.
What Doesn’t Change
Let’s say the AI bubble bursts tomorrow. Here’s what endures:
AI tools will still be useful. ChatGPT and similar tools will still help you write better code, conduct faster research, and automate tasks. Technology doesn’t disappear when stock prices fall.
Companies will still need AI skills. When dot-com burst, companies didn’t stop needing web developers—they just stopped paying insane salaries to anyone who knew HTML. Real skills thrived.
Sustainable applications will survive. AI use cases that generate value—code assistance, content generation, data analysis—won’t vanish. Only overhyped, unprofitable applications will.
Infrastructure remains. All those data centers being built? They’re physical assets that will outlast any company that goes bust.
The Saturday Connection
This weekend’s meetup focuses on exactly what survives market cycles: practical skills that deliver measurable value. Not hype. Not speculation. Not buzzwords that sound good in pitch decks but don’t translate to real work.
We’re building the capabilities the dot-com survivors needed: understanding how to use powerful tools effectively, focusing on sustainable value creation, and adapting as technologies mature.
The companies raising billions might fail. Valuations might crash. But professionals who can demonstrate real AI proficiency—the kind that saves time, improves quality, and solves actual problems? Those careers endure.
Because here’s the thing about Halloween: The masks come off eventually. What matters is what’s underneath.
See you Saturday Touchdown Coworking , where we’ll work on skills that survive any season—bull market, bear market, or anywhere in between.
Thanks for reading this edition. Until next week 🚀
Onwards and upwards,
Team SaugaTech
CONNECT | COLLABORATE | INNOVATE