AI stocks are expensive. But expensive stocks alone don’t crash a market. Because if high valuations were truly fatal… Amazon would have died in 1998, Cisco in 1999, Tesla in 2017, and Nvidia in 2021. Valuation is never the trigger for the pop. It’s the gunpowder waiting for a spark. A bubble doesn’t burst simply because the price gets high; it bursts when something finally lights the fuse. And if we want to understand whether this AI boom ends in fireworks or continues climbing steadily, we need to look past the price tags and examine the pressure points quietly building beneath the floorboards.

1. Tightening liquidity

The first pressure point isn’t about AI at all; it’s about money. Markets don’t move based on technology; they move based on liquidity. When money is cheap, optimism spreads effortlessly. When money tightens, even the most perfect narrative begins to wobble. All it takes is a single hotter-than-expected CPI print, a Fed meeting where...