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A comment on I'm Not Convinced the AI Bubble Exists. Parent comment

Re:I'm Not Convinced the AI Bubble Exists by dr_dshiv on Monday November 09, 2026 @04:56AM (#50423426)
“When the dot-com bubble happened, it was largely driven by companies that couldn't turn a profit or had P/E ratios in the hundreds. I'm not going to pretend that I'm an expert on financial bubbles, but I've never heard of a bubble where the companies involved had such a modest valuation based on their earnings, even if their earnings (and therefore their evaluations) are enormous.”

Do you know the situation with rail, canals, etc?

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Re:I'm Not Convinced the AI Bubble Exists by etiennebausson on Monday November 09, 2026 @06:02AM (#50423945)
Railroads had some of the same issue encountered by the dotcom bubble, and in particular dark fiber: Overcapacity.

Once railroads where demonstrated to be (extremely) profitable, people kept building them even if the existing demand was already met. The exact same thing happened with dark fiber (looking at you Enron).

AI is a bit different in the sense that the capacity can be used for research, and more importantly is not bound to a specific connection (between locations), and therefore a lot more fungible.

Not sure about canals, but while I think there are issue with current AI investments, I would not conflate them with the railroad bubble on this basis.

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Re:I'm Not Convinced the AI Bubble Exists by pydry on Monday November 09, 2026 @07:54AM (#50424933)
AI is a bit different in that unlike the rail tracks and the dark fiber the data centers arent actually going to be finished. It's much more of a stranded asset.
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Re:I'm Not Convinced the AI Bubble Exists by dcrazy on Monday November 09, 2026 @09:39AM (#50426283)
You don’t think there were half-finished rail lines abandoned when the companies ran out of money?
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Re:I'm Not Convinced the AI Bubble Exists by pydry on Monday November 09, 2026 @10:45AM (#50427163)
Not at all. They were just a lot more salvageable.
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