AI Bubble Could Be Ready to Pop and Jim Cramer May Be the Warning Sign

Benzinga and Yahoo Finance LLC may earn commission or revenue on some items through the links below.

The rising values of artificial intelligence stocks and their outperformance compared to other S&P 500 stocks in 2026 has former hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson sending a bubble warning. Here's why.

Tilson draws a parallel between today's AI trade and the technology stocks that drove the dot-com bubble to its March 2000 peak.

Here are the top 10 best-performing stocks in the S&P 500, which is tracked by the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (as of 8/14/26), as shared by Charlie Bilello , with their industry and year-to-date gains listed below:

Sandisk Corp : technology hardware, +591.3%

Dell Technologies : technology hardware, +293.5%

Seagate Technology Holdings : technology hardware, +254.4%

Micron Technology : semiconductors, +240.7%

Western Digital Corp : technology hardware, +195.6%

Marvell Technology : semiconductors, +161.6%

Lumentum Holdings : communications equipment, +151.3%

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. : technology hardware, +146.6%

Advanced Micro Devices : semiconductors, +140.2%

All 10 stocks are AI-related names and benefiting from the AI trade, Tilson said in a newsletter Tuesday.

For comparison, Tilson asked AI chatbots about the top-performing stocks during the dot-com bubble. Tilson used March 10, 2000, as that was the day the Nasdaq Composite Index peaked.

"Give me the definitive historical-constituent top 10 S&P 500 stocks with exact December 31, 1999 to March 10, 2000 percentage gains," Tilson's prompt reads.

ChatGPT was the only bot to return a close answer. Here are the 10 stocks that fit the criteria:

Tilson highlights that all 10 of those stocks at the peak of the Nasdaq index before the dot-com bubble were technology related, "reflecting the Internet craze at the time."

"It reminds me of what Mark Twain is reputed to have said: 'History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.'"

Another bubble indicator may have to do with television personality Jim Cramer , Tilson wrote recently.

"There's little doubt in my mind that we're in a similar AI bubble right now – but I'm much less certain how much further it will inflate and when exactly it will burst," Tilson said.