Most of this is spot-on, but the framing is wrong. As you explain, boom-bust cycles are an inherent feature of free-market systems, as seen in US and UK history for several centuries - especially in the 19th and 20th. Railroad booms contributed to defaults by 4 states in the US.
But they are not Marxist ‘theft by the Bourgeois’, as you seem to imply. They are human nature at work, leading to winners and losers - but faster economic growth than in ‘rationally planned’ economies. Nineteen C Britain managed these cycles better than the US, with little State involvement while minimizing damaged to the banking system (“in a crisis lend freely, at a penalty rate, against good collateral”, misleadingly called Bagehot’s Law).
Those data centers will almost certainly find new customers, especially if many of their current owners lose them in bankruptcy. So their services can be sold at cheaper rates, assuming that the NVIDA chips have long-enough service lives. Automation, algorithms, machine sensors, models - a new Industrial Revolution has begun. It does not depend on chatbots (large language models, generative AI).
The Big 7 tech stocks might crash. But the stock market’s effect on the real economy is usually exaggerated.
I like the debate this has spurred. While I try to avoid getting into Marxist or other framings explicitly, it's important to note how speculation is a part of every kind of system---"rationally planned" or "irrationally planned." "Planning" doesn't have to mean Soviet-style production targets---firms plan also (both Galbraith and Hayek make this point).
What's more pertinent (in my view here) is how the risk of this activity is distributed. In the case of very powerful agglomerations of infrastructure capital, as with large monopoly/oligopoly, there's a tendency in the history I point to---throughout the era of railroads and the dotcom era (to name a few)---to shift that risk *via state support* onto the most vulnerable and powerless in society. As you mention, that fixed capital (built within a speculative craze) will certainly be left over and put to work. However, in the meantime, people's retirements and livelihoods could be wrecked in the process---with little hope for recovery unless there's significant response by "the state."
Your point about 19th-century Britain is well taken, but it’s important to remember the imperial context. Investments connected to Indian railways at that time were offered a “guaranteed return” to provided steady, *state-backed* income that absorbed excess capital from riskier domestic ventures (tempering domestic downturns). These were also treated as “good collateral” by the Bank of England, meaning its crisis lending rested partly on colonial revenues, helping stabilize Britain’s financial system during downturns. Any guess on whose backs this collateral was built on? Certainly not colonial railroad investors.
Take recent news about pleas from AMD and NVIDIA with the Trump admin to allow chip sales to China (the world's largest market) to keep revenues up as energy bottlenecks in the U.S. are restricting AI rollout. China has long been a release valve for U.S. firm investment since the late 19th century... and now imagine the U.S.'s declining place in the world akin to the decline of Britain's empire. Lot's to ponder!
Do you think there will ever be a reckoning? Or will the poor and the vulnerable pay all the costs all the way down through the dystopian hellscape hunger games climate collapse until we go extinct?
Will there be another French revolution form of justice?
I don’t want to live on a planet run by criminals that walk free while the innocent are in jail.
I couldn’t have created a worst nightmare of hell in my imagination than what humanity has become, or is always been.
Why would nature allow some thing like humanity to even evolve at all?
I mean, maybe earlier on in evolution humans weren’t too much of a blight on the planet? But something happened along the way - some sort of parasitic brain rot infected some subset of people and they also seem to be the strongest.
A world where the people that get to experience beauty and nature are the murderers and criminals is something so sick I don’t understand how anybody can live with themselves.
One more day of this is one more day that millions of children’s souls are murdered in the name of some white guy’s profit.
Every day every day that these sociopathic people do not go in jail is a desecration of all that’s good in this world, and I’m trying to understand how anybody has any desire to be alive at all knowing this. How does anyone look at themselves in the mirror?
this comment and the responses to it are all operating under the assumption that capitalism is human nature. Infrastructure has been built this way in the past due to people searching for ways to extract profit and power. it appears like human nature when you assume a zero sum/capitalistic world is just naturally occurring.
Capitalism is, as you say, not human nature. In fact it is rare across societies and time. It has spread because it produces prosperity more effectively than the countless other systems people have tried.
But capitalism is the opposite of a zero-sum system, which is why it works. Systems built on authoritarian redistribution are zero-sum systems, which is one reason capitalism works better.
Look at global migration patterns, as people flood into capitalist systems. The division of German into communist and capitalist nations was a giant social science experiment. They had to build a wall to keep in the communist one, as the disparity in freedom and prosperity between the two widened.
It has spread because that's the only way it works. It spreads because it operates on oppression and breeds greed, cruelty, as a means of survival. Capitalism is constant growth that needs and feeds on constant consumption. Consumption of the natural resources needed to create products to sell, and constant consumption of the public buying those goods. The prosperity it creates is not wide spread, that is the dream we have all been sold, the prosperity created is actually all accumulated and funneled to the top. where the power created through the accumulation of the means of production, land, and natural resources compounds. Putting a few people in charge of the masses. People are then motivated to try and try and try their very best and work their very hardest under the illusion that prosperity can be achieved by any and all people as long as you work hard enough. Capitalism is an oppressive, zero sum system, there are only winners if there are losers.
Ummm, no. Capitalism spread because money is a highly effective form of power, and capitalism's fundamental purpose is to accumulate money, which polite circles call "capital". As soon as the "most deserving" of the capitalists can commandeer enough cash, they use it to bend the rules and continue taking further power. Stop carrying their water.
Yes same, the question i’m left at the end is: yes, and? This is how infrastructure is built - it is built, overbuilt, and then some of the accumulation is repurposed.
No, it is rarely built this way. Roads, electric power systems, telephone systems, water systems - and so forth all avoided investment bubbles. These happen sometimes, for reasons not well understood. The most common right-wing answer - fiat currencies - is wrong since they occurred in the 19th C when Britain and USA were under gold standards.
“Some of the accumulation is repurposed”
Will that happen with AI data centers? Their chips are highly specialized. I’ve also read that they have short service lives, burning out quickly. Time will tell.
I have been writing about the ritual relationships that appear in societal cycles and behaviors whether consciously or unconsciously. You have pointed out a very apparent loop in the collective dream. The infrastructure for how the life force valued by the society moves throughout the ecosystem shows up as railroads, fiber cables, and AI infrastructure. It builds on the same memory symbols of the past and rebrands them. Just like Pittsburgh steel memories being overwritten by AI booms without a transparent intention beyond “homeland security” and “jobs”. The debt and frenzy to spend recklessly mirrors the individual purchasing cycle. Expansion and extraction as rapid as possible without asking what are we building towards? It generates liability and gravity, binding people towards a specific future with monetary and imaginary covenants. Then the project becomes a massive extraction operation that results in more pain and suffering to play a simulated game or “dream”. The collapse and containment of power repeats and the same theatre play is replayed with a new pair of costumes.
An excellent article on why the Tech Bros should not be trusted, or indeed those behind the push toward most widespread innovations, when it comes to new, evolving industries. Exploitation is invariably the motivation and the financial backers behind them always look to leave someone else holding the baby for the orchestrated crash that siphons off billions into their own bank accounts.
AI is particularly dark. In my opinion AI will become big government. It will become a ruling class the like of which we have never seen before. It will run governments, make laws, exploit resources, create new religions and it will do this by acting as a kill switch on the human imagination, self determination and Self-Realization. The fallout is going to be unimaginable because it will become intrinsically linked to ALL life. In other words, future generations will be born into it not as a tool but a central control panel that runs everything including the mind itself. This is not science fiction. It will become science fact. The end result is that it will lead to the eventual collapse of a planetary society where humans will need to start again without technology.
This will only happen if we allow it, support and create it.
This article is waving a big red flag at the inevitable financial fallout. Take heed people and take heed NOW.
The current generation of “AI” are Large Language Models (aka generative AI, chatbots). They give answers from Reddit and YouTube, with some Wikipedia plus other sources. It is not smart and knows nothing. It just scapes data and answers with fancy probabilistic algorithms.
I agree with this assessment. In 2022, when the big push really happened, major tech company stocks had been falling for 2 or 3 years, and the whole thing seemed manufactured as a prop to the valuations. This was evident in the media landscape - everybody sounded like they were reading from the same script. It did work. Billionaires just want more money.
That said, I always urge people who talk about this topic to read Frederick Brooks' "No Silver Bullet" paper from 1986, where he quotes David Parnas. It's only a 16 page PDF. Read the fold from page 7 to 8, and the opening quote. It's easy to read. Understanding it from this perspective was helpful for me. Brooks was awarded a Turing. https://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks_1986_-_No_Silver_Bullet.pdf
Yes, there is an AI bubble very similar to the dot.com bubble of before. But the thing to remember is, although when that bubble burst a lot of computer companies disappeared, we still have lots of computer companies today, and computers have completely changed our lives. There is an AI bubble because everyone knows that AI is going to be just as transformative, but we have no way of knowing how. There is no way of knowing which company's approach to AI will turn out to be the correct one. So it is a "bubble" in the sense that many, perhaps most of these investments are going to turn out not to have been good investments. Yes, as you say, this is a part of capitalism. But that doesn't change the fact that AI is going to be a major force for transformation in the near and ongoing future.
Yes, perhaps and perhaps not. As you say, we can't really peer into the future to see precisely what will happen. My main point, however, is how risk is being distributed during this speculative phase. There will certainly be corporate and financial survivors and even growth in the sector following the "market correction" (as some might say), but in the meantime people's retirement savings and other important things (like electricity and water utilities) are all bound up within the AI boom. Even so, there's already many battles playing out now in state legislatures over who has to pay for grid upgrades (firms or the average ratepayer) and inhale pollution from fossil plants fueling data centers.
Well, of course, all we can do is wait and see. Do you remember the episode of SEINFELD where Jerry buys an expensive electronic organizer for his dad (he has to lie and claim he got it on sale), but all his dad uses it for is to calculate tips. That's what AI feels like to me right now. It can do SO MUCH, but it is so new that people can't get their head around that, and it is only being used for a tiny fraction of what it could be used for.
"Historically, each phase of speculative infrastructure development has left behind overbuilt systems, concentrated wealth, and long-term costs borne by society at large. The railroads enabled telegraph and telecom networks from which the dot-com bubble laid the digital backbone for cloud computing."
The railroads actually were massively important and valuable though? Would it have been better if they were never built? Or just if they were built more slowly? It's bad for capital to overinvest, but real people really did benefit from faster, cheaper connections to the world from the railroads and slowrolling that would have been worse for them.
I don’t think my insinuation is that they shouldn’t be built. Speculation is part of planning for the future — and a railroad is a railroad whether it’s built by state-enabled monopoly power or a through a more democratically accountable framework. However, the concentration of power over this planning (those who benefit the most) matters a great deal for how risk is distributed or offloaded.
This is the far superior, more articulate, and properly researched version of what I've been trying to yell at my dorky AI worshipping friends over beers.
"speculative cycles remain central to how capital accumulates and offloads risk"
I think it might be more correct to say that speculative cycles are how capital rewards appropriate risk. One or more of the big investors in AI will probably hit on something that the market rewards, while most of them go under for not achieving that success.
Any insight on how new owners of the rail roads and fiber networks would emerge post those great crashes? My intuition tells me that it's active industry players that survive the down trend and are then able to buy assets that are now mispriced by being too low post-crash. But I may be wrong and it comes from new operators/investors from outside the industry.
That is precisely what happens, and it's a bumpy ride. You should read up on J.P. Morgan and the origins of the Gilded Age. Most of the surviving railways and some telecom also have this basic history (look at Level 3, now Lumen Technologies which bought up fiber following the dotcom/fiber bust).
This doesn't mean new or smaller players can't rise or survive, but there's a clear tendency. The cloud era will be an interesting thing to watch, but we're still in the middle of it.
I'd recommend this 100 times if I could. That this is basically the tech industry engaging in over-promised capabilities and corner preacher prostelyzing bouyed by investment vehicles getting drunk off the koolaide & a government wanting to use the hype to justify its own policies is an utter disaster. And the worst is the costs are getting socialized across the entire economy whether people like it or not (and usage is being forced down everyone's throats in a deep ball pass to prevent the bubble from manifesting.
My worry is this has already become a "too big to fail" enterprise and the much needed correction will keep getting kicked down the road, until the inevitable reckoning sinks 1/3 of the economy.
So astutely articulated - “Far from being an accidental byproduct, it is deliberately constructed—extraction is repackaged as innovation, hype replaces substance, and inflated promises attract speculative capital.” Very thought provoking!
That was an excellent analogy. The largest investors have been the big techs and sovereign funds, each of them plowing tens of billions of dollars. The portfolio mgrs and retail investors followed. But the question is: is there enough growth in the economy (GDP) to provide a return for these mega investors? Or, did their FOMO blind them?
Enough "demand" is the key question many business analysts are asking. Look at AMD and NVIDIA's plea to Trump to sell chips to China. In addition to public procurement (military, education, government), the U.S. also aims to export AI to the world. These are clear strategies to find demand where typical customers (including enterprises) aren't creating enough revenue to catch up with investment.
Most of this is spot-on, but the framing is wrong. As you explain, boom-bust cycles are an inherent feature of free-market systems, as seen in US and UK history for several centuries - especially in the 19th and 20th. Railroad booms contributed to defaults by 4 states in the US.
But they are not Marxist ‘theft by the Bourgeois’, as you seem to imply. They are human nature at work, leading to winners and losers - but faster economic growth than in ‘rationally planned’ economies. Nineteen C Britain managed these cycles better than the US, with little State involvement while minimizing damaged to the banking system (“in a crisis lend freely, at a penalty rate, against good collateral”, misleadingly called Bagehot’s Law).
Those data centers will almost certainly find new customers, especially if many of their current owners lose them in bankruptcy. So their services can be sold at cheaper rates, assuming that the NVIDA chips have long-enough service lives. Automation, algorithms, machine sensors, models - a new Industrial Revolution has begun. It does not depend on chatbots (large language models, generative AI).
The Big 7 tech stocks might crash. But the stock market’s effect on the real economy is usually exaggerated.
I like the debate this has spurred. While I try to avoid getting into Marxist or other framings explicitly, it's important to note how speculation is a part of every kind of system---"rationally planned" or "irrationally planned." "Planning" doesn't have to mean Soviet-style production targets---firms plan also (both Galbraith and Hayek make this point).
What's more pertinent (in my view here) is how the risk of this activity is distributed. In the case of very powerful agglomerations of infrastructure capital, as with large monopoly/oligopoly, there's a tendency in the history I point to---throughout the era of railroads and the dotcom era (to name a few)---to shift that risk *via state support* onto the most vulnerable and powerless in society. As you mention, that fixed capital (built within a speculative craze) will certainly be left over and put to work. However, in the meantime, people's retirements and livelihoods could be wrecked in the process---with little hope for recovery unless there's significant response by "the state."
Your point about 19th-century Britain is well taken, but it’s important to remember the imperial context. Investments connected to Indian railways at that time were offered a “guaranteed return” to provided steady, *state-backed* income that absorbed excess capital from riskier domestic ventures (tempering domestic downturns). These were also treated as “good collateral” by the Bank of England, meaning its crisis lending rested partly on colonial revenues, helping stabilize Britain’s financial system during downturns. Any guess on whose backs this collateral was built on? Certainly not colonial railroad investors.
Take recent news about pleas from AMD and NVIDIA with the Trump admin to allow chip sales to China (the world's largest market) to keep revenues up as energy bottlenecks in the U.S. are restricting AI rollout. China has long been a release valve for U.S. firm investment since the late 19th century... and now imagine the U.S.'s declining place in the world akin to the decline of Britain's empire. Lot's to ponder!
Do you think there will ever be a reckoning? Or will the poor and the vulnerable pay all the costs all the way down through the dystopian hellscape hunger games climate collapse until we go extinct?
Will there be another French revolution form of justice?
I don’t want to live on a planet run by criminals that walk free while the innocent are in jail.
I couldn’t have created a worst nightmare of hell in my imagination than what humanity has become, or is always been.
Why would nature allow some thing like humanity to even evolve at all?
I mean, maybe earlier on in evolution humans weren’t too much of a blight on the planet? But something happened along the way - some sort of parasitic brain rot infected some subset of people and they also seem to be the strongest.
A world where the people that get to experience beauty and nature are the murderers and criminals is something so sick I don’t understand how anybody can live with themselves.
One more day of this is one more day that millions of children’s souls are murdered in the name of some white guy’s profit.
Every day every day that these sociopathic people do not go in jail is a desecration of all that’s good in this world, and I’m trying to understand how anybody has any desire to be alive at all knowing this. How does anyone look at themselves in the mirror?
this comment and the responses to it are all operating under the assumption that capitalism is human nature. Infrastructure has been built this way in the past due to people searching for ways to extract profit and power. it appears like human nature when you assume a zero sum/capitalistic world is just naturally occurring.
That’s quite a strange comment.
Capitalism is, as you say, not human nature. In fact it is rare across societies and time. It has spread because it produces prosperity more effectively than the countless other systems people have tried.
But capitalism is the opposite of a zero-sum system, which is why it works. Systems built on authoritarian redistribution are zero-sum systems, which is one reason capitalism works better.
Look at global migration patterns, as people flood into capitalist systems. The division of German into communist and capitalist nations was a giant social science experiment. They had to build a wall to keep in the communist one, as the disparity in freedom and prosperity between the two widened.
It has spread because that's the only way it works. It spreads because it operates on oppression and breeds greed, cruelty, as a means of survival. Capitalism is constant growth that needs and feeds on constant consumption. Consumption of the natural resources needed to create products to sell, and constant consumption of the public buying those goods. The prosperity it creates is not wide spread, that is the dream we have all been sold, the prosperity created is actually all accumulated and funneled to the top. where the power created through the accumulation of the means of production, land, and natural resources compounds. Putting a few people in charge of the masses. People are then motivated to try and try and try their very best and work their very hardest under the illusion that prosperity can be achieved by any and all people as long as you work hard enough. Capitalism is an oppressive, zero sum system, there are only winners if there are losers.
Ummm, no. Capitalism spread because money is a highly effective form of power, and capitalism's fundamental purpose is to accumulate money, which polite circles call "capital". As soon as the "most deserving" of the capitalists can commandeer enough cash, they use it to bend the rules and continue taking further power. Stop carrying their water.
Yes same, the question i’m left at the end is: yes, and? This is how infrastructure is built - it is built, overbuilt, and then some of the accumulation is repurposed.
I don’t understand your question, but I’ll try…
“This is how infrastructure is built.”
No, it is rarely built this way. Roads, electric power systems, telephone systems, water systems - and so forth all avoided investment bubbles. These happen sometimes, for reasons not well understood. The most common right-wing answer - fiat currencies - is wrong since they occurred in the 19th C when Britain and USA were under gold standards.
“Some of the accumulation is repurposed”
Will that happen with AI data centers? Their chips are highly specialized. I’ve also read that they have short service lives, burning out quickly. Time will tell.
I have been writing about the ritual relationships that appear in societal cycles and behaviors whether consciously or unconsciously. You have pointed out a very apparent loop in the collective dream. The infrastructure for how the life force valued by the society moves throughout the ecosystem shows up as railroads, fiber cables, and AI infrastructure. It builds on the same memory symbols of the past and rebrands them. Just like Pittsburgh steel memories being overwritten by AI booms without a transparent intention beyond “homeland security” and “jobs”. The debt and frenzy to spend recklessly mirrors the individual purchasing cycle. Expansion and extraction as rapid as possible without asking what are we building towards? It generates liability and gravity, binding people towards a specific future with monetary and imaginary covenants. Then the project becomes a massive extraction operation that results in more pain and suffering to play a simulated game or “dream”. The collapse and containment of power repeats and the same theatre play is replayed with a new pair of costumes.
An excellent article on why the Tech Bros should not be trusted, or indeed those behind the push toward most widespread innovations, when it comes to new, evolving industries. Exploitation is invariably the motivation and the financial backers behind them always look to leave someone else holding the baby for the orchestrated crash that siphons off billions into their own bank accounts.
AI is particularly dark. In my opinion AI will become big government. It will become a ruling class the like of which we have never seen before. It will run governments, make laws, exploit resources, create new religions and it will do this by acting as a kill switch on the human imagination, self determination and Self-Realization. The fallout is going to be unimaginable because it will become intrinsically linked to ALL life. In other words, future generations will be born into it not as a tool but a central control panel that runs everything including the mind itself. This is not science fiction. It will become science fact. The end result is that it will lead to the eventual collapse of a planetary society where humans will need to start again without technology.
This will only happen if we allow it, support and create it.
This article is waving a big red flag at the inevitable financial fallout. Take heed people and take heed NOW.
“AI will become big government.”
The current generation of “AI” are Large Language Models (aka generative AI, chatbots). They give answers from Reddit and YouTube, with some Wikipedia plus other sources. It is not smart and knows nothing. It just scapes data and answers with fancy probabilistic algorithms.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1620335/top-web-domains-cited-by-llms/
I agree with this assessment. In 2022, when the big push really happened, major tech company stocks had been falling for 2 or 3 years, and the whole thing seemed manufactured as a prop to the valuations. This was evident in the media landscape - everybody sounded like they were reading from the same script. It did work. Billionaires just want more money.
That said, I always urge people who talk about this topic to read Frederick Brooks' "No Silver Bullet" paper from 1986, where he quotes David Parnas. It's only a 16 page PDF. Read the fold from page 7 to 8, and the opening quote. It's easy to read. Understanding it from this perspective was helpful for me. Brooks was awarded a Turing. https://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks_1986_-_No_Silver_Bullet.pdf
Thanks for reference to Brooks’ paper — a good read as well, and helps younger folks realize how “old” the AI topic actually is. 🤖
Yes, there is an AI bubble very similar to the dot.com bubble of before. But the thing to remember is, although when that bubble burst a lot of computer companies disappeared, we still have lots of computer companies today, and computers have completely changed our lives. There is an AI bubble because everyone knows that AI is going to be just as transformative, but we have no way of knowing how. There is no way of knowing which company's approach to AI will turn out to be the correct one. So it is a "bubble" in the sense that many, perhaps most of these investments are going to turn out not to have been good investments. Yes, as you say, this is a part of capitalism. But that doesn't change the fact that AI is going to be a major force for transformation in the near and ongoing future.
Yes, perhaps and perhaps not. As you say, we can't really peer into the future to see precisely what will happen. My main point, however, is how risk is being distributed during this speculative phase. There will certainly be corporate and financial survivors and even growth in the sector following the "market correction" (as some might say), but in the meantime people's retirement savings and other important things (like electricity and water utilities) are all bound up within the AI boom. Even so, there's already many battles playing out now in state legislatures over who has to pay for grid upgrades (firms or the average ratepayer) and inhale pollution from fossil plants fueling data centers.
"everyone knows that AI is going to be just as transformative"
I strongly disagree. LLMs will reach a ceiling and the ultimate impact on everyday life will be a fraction of what the Internet was/has been.
Well, of course, all we can do is wait and see. Do you remember the episode of SEINFELD where Jerry buys an expensive electronic organizer for his dad (he has to lie and claim he got it on sale), but all his dad uses it for is to calculate tips. That's what AI feels like to me right now. It can do SO MUCH, but it is so new that people can't get their head around that, and it is only being used for a tiny fraction of what it could be used for.
"Historically, each phase of speculative infrastructure development has left behind overbuilt systems, concentrated wealth, and long-term costs borne by society at large. The railroads enabled telegraph and telecom networks from which the dot-com bubble laid the digital backbone for cloud computing."
The railroads actually were massively important and valuable though? Would it have been better if they were never built? Or just if they were built more slowly? It's bad for capital to overinvest, but real people really did benefit from faster, cheaper connections to the world from the railroads and slowrolling that would have been worse for them.
I don’t think my insinuation is that they shouldn’t be built. Speculation is part of planning for the future — and a railroad is a railroad whether it’s built by state-enabled monopoly power or a through a more democratically accountable framework. However, the concentration of power over this planning (those who benefit the most) matters a great deal for how risk is distributed or offloaded.
This is the far superior, more articulate, and properly researched version of what I've been trying to yell at my dorky AI worshipping friends over beers.
"speculative cycles remain central to how capital accumulates and offloads risk"
I think it might be more correct to say that speculative cycles are how capital rewards appropriate risk. One or more of the big investors in AI will probably hit on something that the market rewards, while most of them go under for not achieving that success.
https://open.substack.com/pub/betweentasawwufandthed/p/hell-is-empty-and-the-devils-are?r=d54rw&utm_medium=ios
Any insight on how new owners of the rail roads and fiber networks would emerge post those great crashes? My intuition tells me that it's active industry players that survive the down trend and are then able to buy assets that are now mispriced by being too low post-crash. But I may be wrong and it comes from new operators/investors from outside the industry.
That is precisely what happens, and it's a bumpy ride. You should read up on J.P. Morgan and the origins of the Gilded Age. Most of the surviving railways and some telecom also have this basic history (look at Level 3, now Lumen Technologies which bought up fiber following the dotcom/fiber bust).
This doesn't mean new or smaller players can't rise or survive, but there's a clear tendency. The cloud era will be an interesting thing to watch, but we're still in the middle of it.
I'd recommend this 100 times if I could. That this is basically the tech industry engaging in over-promised capabilities and corner preacher prostelyzing bouyed by investment vehicles getting drunk off the koolaide & a government wanting to use the hype to justify its own policies is an utter disaster. And the worst is the costs are getting socialized across the entire economy whether people like it or not (and usage is being forced down everyone's throats in a deep ball pass to prevent the bubble from manifesting.
My worry is this has already become a "too big to fail" enterprise and the much needed correction will keep getting kicked down the road, until the inevitable reckoning sinks 1/3 of the economy.
So astutely articulated - “Far from being an accidental byproduct, it is deliberately constructed—extraction is repackaged as innovation, hype replaces substance, and inflated promises attract speculative capital.” Very thought provoking!
Tucson just stopped Amazon data center.
I saw! Following the local battles and state legislation closely.
That was an excellent analogy. The largest investors have been the big techs and sovereign funds, each of them plowing tens of billions of dollars. The portfolio mgrs and retail investors followed. But the question is: is there enough growth in the economy (GDP) to provide a return for these mega investors? Or, did their FOMO blind them?
Enough "demand" is the key question many business analysts are asking. Look at AMD and NVIDIA's plea to Trump to sell chips to China. In addition to public procurement (military, education, government), the U.S. also aims to export AI to the world. These are clear strategies to find demand where typical customers (including enterprises) aren't creating enough revenue to catch up with investment.
Exactly https://substack.com/@spuggywritings/note/p-170380964?r=1si1y&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
Excellent essay. Thanks