It was a while ago, yet not that long ago, when both the AI and the Space sector boomed. The 1960s were a boom decade for both.
Space
1961: First human space flight
1960s Mercury & Gemini Programs & moon landing in 1969
AI
the 60s saw early programs like ELIZA (1966), the development of perceptrons and early neural net research, and significant DARPA funding into AI labs at MIT, Stanford, and CMU. Researchers like Marvin Minsky made famously bold predictions that human-level AI was just a couple of decades away.
Stock market perspective
In the early 1960s there was a speculative boom nicknamed the “Tronics boom” — investors piled into anything with “-tronics” or “-onics” in the name, betting on electronics, aerospace, and defense companies riding the space race and early computing wave. Many of these had thin or speculative earnings relative to their valuations, and the boom corrected sharply around 1962. Later in the decade, the “Nifty Fifty” emerged — a set of large-cap growth stocks (including tech and aerospace names) that investors believed could be bought “at any price” because their growth seemed unstoppable; that thesis also unwound painfully in the 1973-74 bear market.
Today’s AI boom shows similar structural features: a small set of “Magnificent Seven” style mega-cap stocks (Nvidia, Microsoft, etc.) driving a large share of index returns, massive capital expenditure justified by a transformative technology narrative, and debate over whether valuations are justified by near-term earnings or are pricing in speculative future growth. Just like the 60s, there’s a mix of genuine technological breakthrough and a market narrative that could be running ahead of fundamentals in pockets.
A key difference: today’s leading AI companies (Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, etc.) are largely highly profitable with real revenue growth already, unlike many speculative 1960s “-tronics” stocks that had little earnings to back the hype. That makes today’s situation arguably closer to the “Nifty Fifty” pattern (quality growth companies priced for perfection) than the more purely speculative Tronics boom.
However the user facing AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropics, SpaceX, etc.) while having high revenues are not currently profitable. The SpaceX IPO shows us that there is an enormous appetite for shares in promissing but still unprofitable companies.
Conclusion
In the 1960s there was both an AI and Space boom, both subsided in the early 70s as public enthusiasm waned for spage-age stuff and AI entered its first winter when it did not deliver on its lofty promises.
*Disclaimer: some content generated by AI
