The trading week from December 8-16, 2025, saw major turbulence in artificial intelligence stocks, even as other parts of the market reached new record highs. The dramatic swing showed how investors are losing confidence in some of the biggest names that powered gains throughout 2025.

The Time Magazine Effect

Time magazine made headlines on Thursday, December 12, when it announced its annual "Person of the Year" award. This year, instead of picking one person, Time chose a group: "The Architects of AI." The honorees included some of the most famous business leaders in the world. Mark Zuckerberg runs Meta Platforms. Jensen Huang leads Nvidia, a company that makes computer chips for AI. Elon Musk founded xAI and also runs Tesla and SpaceX. Sam Altman is the boss of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. The magazine also recognized Lisa Su from Advanced Micro Devices, Demis Hassabis who leads Google's DeepMind division, and others.

But many investors noticed something spooky about this honor. Time magazine's Person of the Year has a "curse" attached to it. Historically, when Time picks someone or something to celebrate on its cover, that choice often marks the peak of that person's popularity or success. In other words, picking winners from the cover of Time magazine has actually been a great way to predict future losers. Some researchers studied this pattern and found that investments connected to Time's choices were up after one year only 13% of the time. After two years, the numbers were still bad at just 25%. Experts questioned whether the magazine curse might finally strike the booming AI trade.

Oracle's Shocking Earnings and Data Center Delays

The worst news came just hours before Time announced its Person of the Year. Oracle, one of the biggest software companies in the world and a major AI player, reported disappointing earnings and announced it would spend much more money on data center construction. The company raised its spending forecast by another $15 billion, mostly for data centers that would host OpenAI's artificial intelligence operations.

Here is the problem: Building these data centers is harder than expected. Bloomberg reported that Oracle had to push back completion dates for some of its OpenAI data centers from 2027 to 2028. The reason? "Labor and material shortages." That means Oracle could not find enough workers and could not get all the building materials it needed. One particularly ambitious project called Project Jupiter, planned for New Mexico, is supposed to become a massive $160 billion AI campus. This project became a symbol of how expensive and difficult the AI buildout is becoming.

The Broader Market Struggle

Oracle's bad news dragged down the entire AI sector. The big tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell below its recent record highs from October. Broadcom, which makes chips for data centers, dropped more than 12% after its own earnings disappointed investors. Nvidia, the star of the AI boom, fell about 10% from its peak. Some stocks fell into bear market territory, meaning they dropped 20% or more from their highest prices.

Yet surprisingly, the overall stock market stayed strong. The S&P 500 and Dow Jones both hit all-time highs during the week. This showed that while AI stocks were struggling, other parts of the market were doing well.

Why Is The AI Buildout So Expensive?

The core issue is that five major tech companies—Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle—need enormous amounts of money to build AI infrastructure. Together, these companies issued roughly $121 billion in bonds in 2025 to pay for their data centers. This is way above normal levels and marks a huge shift toward using debt financing instead of paying from company earnings. Building AI infrastructure requires physical hardware, real estate, workers, and electricity. It is not as easy as creating software once and selling it many times over.

What Experts Are Saying

Some investment experts, like Ed Yardeni, now worry the "magazine-cover curse" might strike AI stocks. Others point out that the AI trade is now common knowledge—so common that it appears in general-interest magazines like Time. When investment ideas become this well-known to regular people, there may not be much money left to make. The AI boom that created wealth for investors earlier in the year may be approaching a turning point. Companies are discovering that AI buildout is a long, difficult, expensive process, not a quick path to profits.