MW Waiting for AI bubble to burst? The sector already has taken out the trash, says VanEck's CEO

By Jules Rimmer

VanEck's chief executive anticipates fewer shocks for the economy and interest-rate policy in 2026

Investors already have removed some of the excesses of the AI trade, says the CEO of fund manager VanEck.

The chief executive of fund manager VanEck says investors waiting for the artificial-intelligence bubble have missed that it already did.

"They got their teeth kicked in the fourth quarter," says Jan van Eck, CEO of the fund management firm founded by his father, on the Excess Returns podcast, pointing to shares of Oracle $(ORCL)$ and CoreWeave (CRWV), bitcoin miners and other leveraged expressions of compute buildout. "I like Josh Brown's expression, took out its own trash," he said.

After the market volatility of 2025, Van Eck says that this reset in valuations across the AI sector has been a "healthy correction" laying a solid foundation for moving into what he calls phase two of the AI transformation, that will ultimately be positive for stocks.

Van Eck believes the U.S. fiscal deficit is on a "healthy downward trajectory," from 6.2% last year toward 5.3%, while he expects a "less interventionist" Federal Reserve, an opinion that may be controversial in some quarters given the comments from President Donald Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

The conversation with Van Eck was wide-ranging but the central component was the AI sector and the boom or bubble debate.

Van Eck is clearly in the camp of those who believe in the potential of this revolutionary technology. He ranks it alongside the advent of the railroad in terms of its impact and sees a clear two-year runway of insatiable demand for tokens and for compute power.

After recent share price disappointment, Van Eck likes the fact that earnings from the likes of TSMC $(TSM)$ and Nvidia (NVDA), whose earnings are co-dependent, are increasing while the stocks aren't, making them cheaper every day. Van Eck posits that what's sometimes "underappreciated" in discussions about AI stocks are "unbelievable profit machines." Revenues are flourishing but the headcount has been flat for several years, with AI making them increasingly efficient.

What makes this "healthy correction" as opposed to a bubble bursting is that there is plenty of differentiation between winners and losers. Van Eck emphasizes that the difference between say this era, and that of the dot-com boom and bust is that most of these tech companies are already extremely profitable and cashflow generative, which wasn't the case back in the 2000 to 2002 period.

Like many observers of this sector, however, Van Eck believes it's quite possible the biggest beneficiaries of the AI bonanza are not even appearing on investors' radars at present. He cites the example of John D. Rockefeller who happened to be the biggest producer of kerosene just when the automobile industry took off. He's enthusiastic about semiconductors, cloud platforms, data center infrastructure plays and other "enablers of compute."

He is very complimentary about OpenAI, which he thinks has the potential to compete with Amazon (AMZN) both for the American consumer and corporate America because its product has the best market share for AI prompts. What's crucial for the best AI players, Van Eck maintains, is that internet traffic is a huge competitive advantage and those with the best traffic will succeed.

Van Eck himself is a keen adopter of AI and reveals that all of his employees have access to a ChatGPT license. He envisages huge efficiency gains to be derived from its incorporation into business operations and practices.

Van Eck's CEO is also interested in the indirect beneficiaries of AI growth, citing the example of the nuclear sector that is suddenly popular as demand for electricity generation rises inexorably. As a specialist provider of exchange-traded funds VanEck has launched a nuclear ETF to exploit this trend.

-Jules Rimmer

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January 26, 2026 07:52 ET (12:52 GMT)

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