The wider mood around AI spending has been getting cautious. Bond markets have grown uneasy about the scale of hyperscaler capex, with credit spreads on Google, Amazon and Meta widening as lenders demand more compensation for the risk. Even Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has admitted that his own company’s AI budget is large enough to cause concern internally. Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu has gone further, calling the AI buildout an investment bubble where the money spent is real but the profits remain mostly on paper. NYU’s Ashwath Damodaran has warned that any correction could be more painful than the dot-com bust, precisely because so much real capital has already gone into building data centers and buying chips.
Airbnb is not reading the moment the same way. In an interview with CNBC following the company’s second-quarter earnings, Brian Chesky said outright that Airbnb is going to spend beyond its own budget on AI this year, and that he sees it as a good problem to have. “We are going to spend a lot more on AI tokens this year than we forecasted,” he said. “But that’s great because the ROI is there and therefore our revenue is much higher.”
The comments came alongside a set of numbers that gave Chesky room to make that case. Airbnb’s stock jumped as much as 17% after the company posted one of its strongest quarters in years and raised its full-year outlook, a result Chesky is attributing largely to the way AI has reshaped how the company builds and runs its product. He said Airbnb has cut product development time by roughly 60%, is shipping about 80% more features year over year, and has managed to do all of this while keeping headcount close to flat. Customer service has also gotten cheaper: 45% of guests who interact with Airbnb’s AI agent now resolve their issue without ever speaking to a human.
That combination of faster shipping, lower headcount pressure, and rising revenue is what led Chesky to describe the shift in fairly sweeping terms. “I think now it’s safe to say AI is the best thing to have happened to Airbnb,” he said. “I think we’re becoming an AI-native company, and I think that is probably the number one explanation for our results.”
Much of the credit for that shift, according to Chesky, sits with Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta’s former head of generative AI, who joined Airbnb as CTO in January with a mandate to make the company AI-native. Chesky has said Airbnb was “middle of the pack” on AI before Al-Dahle came on board. Since then, the company has been piloting AI-powered search, using AI to write personalized listing highlights and answers for guests, and helping hosts generate and price their listings.
What makes Airbnb’s position notable is the contrast with how much of the rest of the industry is currently talking about AI spend. Hyperscaler capex is on track to cross $715 billion in 2026, and a growing share of that conversation is about whether the revenue will eventually catch up to the outlay, not whether it already has. Chesky’s answer, at least for Airbnb, is that it already has, and that the company plans to spend even more to keep it that way.