The context is different. We learned about the circular financing deals in Oct 2025: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45473033 and since then most people have been speculating a bubble which has inflated a lot in the year since.

The AI bubble is the background context, but on top of that there is the immediate context Anthropic S1 where we learned what journalists had been speculating for a while that the AI industry is in fact not nearly as large to justify the valuations of AI companies. And finally we have the election where local governments in the USA were elected on the grounds to stop the AI datacenter buildout.

Now with that context in mind the current dip does not look like some random and normal fluctuations in the market.

What is also different, for me at least, is that many of us (including my self) are rooting for the AI bubble to burst. And seeing these signs makes us existed that it is finally (maybe) starting to happen.