Meta surges 11% on cloud business news, leading midday stock movers

A growing roster of investors, strategists and industry leaders are warning that the artificial-intelligence boom may be nearing a breaking point, with concerns shifting from the debt and interest rates funding massive data centers to the technology's potential for catastrophic harm. Ray Dalio said the bubble is nearing the point where it may burst because rising interest rates and increased borrowing to fund the AI infrastructure buildout create a need for cash, while strategist Joachim Klement said his core conviction is that the AI bubble will burst in 2027 or 2028. Michael Burry has taken short positions against Nvidia, Oracle, Palantir, Nebius, Micron and CoreWeave, arguing that enormous capital spending might not translate into durable returns, and Galaxy Digital CEO Michael Novogratz called it the biggest bubble of our lifetime while advising investors to ride the wave. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said investors as a whole are overexcited about AI, and Sequoia's David Cahn put the annual gap between AI infrastructure spending and ecosystem revenue at nearly $600 billion, saying the bubble is reaching a tipping point. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for slowing the pace of AI model improvements, with OpenAI's Sam Altman and SpaceX founder Elon Musk agreeing, after Anthropic insider Evan Hubinger put his personal estimate of the probability that AI could kill all humans at more than 10% within the next decade.

Computing power leasing is becoming one of the most crowded tracks in the A-share market. According to data from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, the domestic computing power leasing market reached 68 billion yuan in the first quarter of 2026, up about 60 percent year on year, and is expected to exceed 260 billion yuan for the full year. During the same period, domestic AI computing power demand grew 417 percent year on year, while supply grew only 128 percent. According to a Securities Times report in June this year, there are already more than 70 computing power leasing concept stocks, spanning 15 industries, with market capitalizations ranging from 2 billion yuan to 120 billion yuan. A recent investigation by Cailian Press found that among 16 listed companies with computing power contracts exceeding 500 million yuan, 10 had contracts that were terminated after a period of disclosure or had still not begun performance. Among them, Lanyun Technology's 3.707 billion yuan computing power cloud service agreement had still not entered actual performance as of September 8, 2026, while Annil is expected to lose up to 60.4285 million yuan after the termination of its acquisition of a 22 percent stake in Shenzhen Innovation Technology Co., Ltd. Samples of main-business drift are also dense. Qunxing Toys announced the termination of its restructuring, which had lasted nearly eight months, on the evening of October 20. Lianhua Holdings recorded computing power service revenue of 122 million yuan in 2025, accounting for only 3.53 percent of its total operating revenue of 3.452 billion yuan, while the value of computing power leasing contracts terminated early in the same period reached 1.228 billion yuan. On the regulatory front, China Securities Regulatory Commission Chairman Wu Qing made a clear statement at the 2026 Lujiazui Forum, saying that the commission will strictly investigate and punish those who use technology as a pretext to chase hot topics and speculate on concepts. So far this year, the commission has investigated and dealt with seven cases of misleading statements. On July 6, the Shanghai Stock Exchange also upgraded the permission functions of its SSE e-interaction platform, suspending reply permissions for 12 months for companies penalized for hype-chasing.