The Economist shows the biggest investment cycle in history. The chart has a catch.

Oh yeah...the Canal Mania of 1853, here we go again!

I’m still recovering from that one

A lot of people are still underwater.

Should have locked in gainz.

I sea what you did there.

I am digging all this canal talk

Fitting

Lots of banks went under during Canal Mania, my friends

It's a great excuse to dredge up all these nautical puns

Those investments never got channeled into more solid opportunities

I’ve been tax loss harvesting for 172 years now.

oh, I didn't realize the C was silent

I'm still sore 172 years later

My Canal has never been the same tbh.

Canal mania?? And all this time i thought it was Canal-a-palooza?

Fucking lol

What's Canal mania ? Canadian anal ?

August Ames, Shayla Stylez, they are hot Canal

RIP August Ames. One of the best. 💓 🍆💦

It‘s just regular poutine…with a pretty interesting finish…

I went bust investing in her canals. Never going into canals again!

I thought that was in the UK. and railway mania was more US, I feel like it got those flipped

This is an absolutely ridiculous graphic lmao

But the *implication*!

The implication from the graph is we'll keep spending as much for at least another three years worst case. So much for the bubble popping lol.

I thought I might be the only one thinking that logic. "cool, so I have 3 more years of growth, and then skynet comes online to make none of it matter."

Robot apocalypse really takes the pressure off of retirement planning.

Now, you said that word *implication* a couple of times. What implication?

My great great great grandfather said the same thing during canal mania. Ma said he was never the same after he moved back to Ol’ Hickory Smoke

i know it gave me a good laugh

Here’s why I hate this slop. I’m old enough to remember the dotcom bust. I remember the sock puppet ads on the super bowl and the bogus companies with zero revenue gaining massive market caps. That couldn’t be any further from where we are today. Go look at the recent TMS numbers or any numbers related to AI. One last thing… the current price swoon has lowered RSI across the board. That didn’t happen in the dotcom. Now get off my damned lawn.

Best example comparison i heard was that dotcom and railways were spending on the basis of "build it and they will come", whereas ai is more like "fuck everyone's here shit shit shit pay 500% over rrp to get them what they want just build it they're here!". The main valid criticism is that all the AI capex is being built to feed two companies. Typically, 10% concentration of revenues from a single source is considered high risk and needs to be explicitly reported as a major business risk by accounting standards. Many mutual funds legally cannot hold more than 10% of their holdings in a single stock. Now, we're bending many risk rules, and also starting to do funky financing and credit swaps by the hyperscalers to pay 500% over rrp for ai hardware to serve the two AI hardware consumers.

If those companies dissapear, the demand doesn't go away. It will shift to other companies.

That's the thought that's keeping the bubble floating, whether it will stand up to reality and to what degree is the concern.

The question becomes how much demand is there when AI companies starts charging the real cost of tokens along with covering the debt and getting a nice profit. I mean we saw companies riot when OpenAI changed there payment plan and they got there first bill. And need i remind people this hardware is meant to run for 6 years. So new hardware causing tokens cost reduction isn't happening.

The costs aren't actually high. Maybe if you're looping multiple agents to perform long running tasks, but someone using a CLI for coding on GLM 5.2 will costs about $10/day

Cisco made a fuck ton of money. The stock cratered when revenue went down like 5% 

i mean if that is what you are comapring the current AI boom should worry you extremly. because yes at the dotcom bust had companies with no revenue but what we have right now is big revenue with gigantic losses. so if they go down, they will take the market with them. and just do be clear we are talking about hundred of billions if not close a trillion dollars worth of dept thats being accumulated via AI. even IF some company mages to make a profit which is just doubtfull, as they did not managed to do it in the last 4 years which not much changing from an outlook perspective, the profit will be small, as the datacenters have to be restocked with new hardware and inference cost will most likly keep being expensive. So you have gigantic never before seen debt coupled with extrem valuations, and no clear way to profitiablity. that stuff is scary as hell.

Revenue with losses is different from no revenue. When you have revenue, you can borrow to pay off loans, you stay in the game long enough to amortize capex spend. It’s an entirely different scenario. But that’s not your point. Your point is that the whole thing can come crashing down and drag the economy with it. And I’ll say that’s entirely possible. Except the latest TMSC numbers and the latest MU numbers and the latest INTC and NVDA and AMD and GOOG numbers tell a story of increasing demand and heroic struggles to meet that demand. Are they over investing? Are there too many DCs being built? Are there too many chips? Nope. Not that anyone with proof can point to. And what of their valuations? Are too many people too leveraged and pouring money into these tickers? They were three months ago. They aren’t now. The RSI across all AI related tickers has plunged oher the past two months. So, yeah, I get the risk to the economy if the music stops. But that has nothing to do with revenue free sock puppets.

So you don’t think AI will lead to a huge crash?

I continually see people who are arguing against an AI bubble making the wrong argument. The argument isn't whether AI is a useful technology or whether it will be around in 20 years. I don't think any reasonable person thinks AI, as a technology, is just going to go away. The "bubble" argument is, instead, 1) AI industry revenues will not justify the large CapEx being spent on it. 2) The insanely large sales ratios AI companies are trading at will be not be justified by the earnings/sales AI eventually generates. 3) Even if AI succeeds and is very profitable for some companies, there will only be a few winners. Most of the companies developing proprietary models right now will simply fail or divisions of bigger companies will be written off/laid off when it becomes clear they aren't one of those winners.

To add. Ai tech spend is compute not model training. So the value isn't what you think it is. Its not really capex, but actually a subsidy.

That’s not true, inference has a 50% grid margin, the spend is on CAPEX and R&D.

No, you are conflating CAPEX grid margin with R&D inference, but that requires a *two* party inverse spend (which makes no sense).

Just out of curiosity, what the hell does that mean

On top od that. Model training never goes away...

making the wrong argument.

They aren't making the wrong argument. You've just made up your mind and its easier to paint the counterargument as poorly fleshed out than take it seriously.

AI industry revenues will not justify the large CapEx being spent on it

The counter argument is...it will...easily.

The insanely large sales ratios AI companies are trading at will be not be justified by the earnings/sales AI eventually generates.

The counter argument is...they will...easily.

Even if AI succeeds and is very profitable for some companies, there will only be a few winners.

This is just an odd one. 'A few winners'...like you think its just a bunch of wrapper companies that are being hyped in this market? Unless you are a frontier lab or into semis/picks and shovels, you are not part of the discussion...there are no winners and losers...because the losers have already lost.

The required revenue to justify the valuations is in the range of thousands of dollars a year per paying customer. (let's say three trillion dollars at a P/E of 15 = 200b a year. If you sell 100m subscriptions that's 2k a year each). The actual power users are a smaller number paying a proportionally much higher sum. The question isn't the frontiers, it's the open models. People talk about the costs of hosting those but when you look at the prices the frontiers need to charge to make money that starts to look pretty reasonable. The math gets pretty ugly pretty quickly.

Don’t forget about the competition to those companies that this whole investment cycle builds around (anthropic and openai). If china provides same level ai but cheaper than theese companies, which they do as of today, the revenue won’t grow exponentially. If the US chooses to ban chineese ai to artificially force US companies to use the two companies AIs it will create a bottleneck in cost efficiency to the rest of the world. It’s a fucked-fucked scenario either way. Google Microsoft and Meta builds data centers and they say they’ll use it for 20 years while nvidia drops a new architecture every 18 months and that is the worst case, in 5 years they’d be 3 generations behind. So what, they’ll refinance for another 20 years next december to buy the new hardware? If not will they let their datacenters’ efficiency to decay into oblivion? I don’t see the out of this game, and I’m sure as hell anthropic and openai won’t produce the revenue they’re promising as if suddenly they’ll drop the best ai in the world 10 years ahead of competion, major adoption isn’t going to happen overnight, not even through 4 quarters.

You think a trillion dollar AI buildout is predicated on a bunch of consumer subscriptions? I budget $20k-30k/yr per employee on AI token spend for agentic development and would happily double that.

The companies are already starting to see signs of pricing themselves out and they're nowhere near the numbers they need.

This simply isn't true lol.

The question isn't the frontiers, it's the open models.

But beyond that you also think the long term play is...AI coding? With models that we all knew would commoditize? Long term this is about embodied agents and AI powered robotics. The US loses out on trillions of dollars GDP a year because of massive labor shortages. As soon as we can start addressing that gap with AI powered robotics, this current build-out will look tame.

That would be that smaller number of big spenders. One would expect the distribution to be approximately normal. 1% paying 20k isn't enough either. And, yeah, companies are curtailing token spend now. Enterprise is probably close to saturating ,and retail isn't particularly monetizable. AI powered robotics are, at this point, rather nebulous and pie i n the sky as a concept. A lot of proponents don't seem to realize how mature industrial automation already is, and typically without the added overhead of AI. You're welcome to spend your money on wishful thinking, but I will opt out and stick to the boring old companies that sell things profitably. .

That would be that smaller number of big spenders. So what I'm hearing you say is that there are less corporations and large companies than there are individual consumers? I'm not sure you're making the point you think you are.

Enterprise is probably close to saturating ,and retail isn't particularly monetizable.

Again, based on cope and vibes. We already know that these labs are pulling in vast amounts of money. Billions of dollars a year. From just token usage. And basically all enterprise spend moved to token based billing early this year, its no longer subsidized. Corporations still cannot get enough.

AI powered robotics are, at this point, rather nebulous and pie i n the sky as a concept.

Its really not. Are you actually current on the landscape?

companies had reasonable valuations

I do not understand why people create mythical companies to reinforce their narrative. What are these AI companies that you speak of that are massively overvalued and publicly traded? Have you looked at the P/E of AI companies? Microsoft? \~20x Google? \~17x Meta? \~17x etc... I guess enjoy your shares of general motors and coke though?

OpenAI and Anthropic. Both of which are deeply unprofitable. Go accuse someone else of "cope" for pointing that out.

Can you point us in the direction of these overvalued Anthropic/OAI shares. I'm sure many here would like to buy them... ...unless of course they don't exist and you're fabricating data points extrapolated from rumors and 'trust me bro' reporting in an attempt to support your feeble regurgitated talking points.

The valuation of Anthropic and OAI through investment rounds is common knowledge and readily available, we don’t need their stock to be tradable on NASDAQ to know they are currently very ambitiously valued.

I wouldn’t bother with these people. They don’t understand what they are writing. This is classic AI investor psychosis where they only want to hear half the story. Anyone who uses “lol” as a counter point argument is cooked. They will be ill prepared when the shit hits the fan. They don’t want to know about the growing data centre buildout debt, Chinese LLM models being primed for 2027, compute limitations, GPU shelf life, or overvaluations on the two AI start ups. They just want to know “number go up”… but one day it will be too late for them. Given what’s happening with Iran and the yen in Japan, the correction may end up far worse than even we think possible.

Looking at P/E at the moment is beyond stupid since most of the earnings growth for those companies is coming from unrealized gains of the stales these companies have in OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX

“this simply isn’t true lol” - oh dear, just vibes I guess. Good luck, you’ll need it.

I mean, not vibes. I would have thought you luddites would have actually looked at some real data. Have you heard of an earnings report before? Microsoft Q3 26

AI business had surpassed a $37 billion annual revenue run rate, growing 123% YoY.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/… Google Q2 26

Cloud revenue grew 82%, powered by strong demand for AI infrastructure and AI solutions. And Cloud backlog grew to $514 billion. It's great to see the wide adoption of Gemini Enterprise, with nearly 90% of the Fortune 100 using it.

.

Our model APIs are now processing approximately 22 billion tokens per minute. That's up from 16 billion just a quarter ago.

https://abc.xyz/investor/events/event-det… Amazon Q2 26

hundreds of thousands of customers now use Bedrock, more customers were added in the last six months than in the first two years after launch, and customers spent more in Q2 than all prior quarters combined.

https://ir.aboutamazon.com/news-release/n… Put that copium in your pipe and smoke it.

ai obviously is here to stay, but i think out of the opposition comes from the hamfisted rollout (use ai for everything even if it makes no sense), coupled with... let's say ill advised abrasive marketing stunts lije the "stop hiring humans". Layer on the frankly corrupt way datacenter developed has been pushed through over local will. Layer further on this technology is just gasoline on the wralth inequality fire, and theres no planning to address the structural unemployment this will cause. I can definitely see why people oppose it.

Thought the problem were if it would make more money over the costs? As they expect each new data centers only have equipment that lasts for a few years, whatever are they doing in 4 years? Selling for scrapes and building a new centers / equipment in it?

The part most people leave out is politics. Some mention “bailouts”, but it could just as easily be public pushback for policy that would make them unprofitable. But the nature of this technology to reshape humanity makes that so nebulous. Seems very likely that key powerbrokers on the inside will do well, like Elon with X, while shareholders and speculators will get played. This has been pretty well foreshadowed by these AI CEOs who’ve already said investing in AI should be seen as a social good like Philanthropy than speculation. Also the long forgotten “no moat” warnings. The moat I see is from authenticity, trust and transparency built by people like Dario and Mo Gawdat and others at times. I think these AI executives in general have actually been a lot more authentic and transparent than they get credit for. Every thing they say that isnt self serving is twisted and seen as PR lies. It may be PR, they have incentives and are humans, but they’re doin a lot to sound warning alarms every week to let everyone know we’re playing with fire My prediction and hope is that power and talent will gravitate toward whoever seems like the best stewards of this technology, along with public consent

All true. Thing is even so this doesn't mean a big dotcom style collapse. I'm just not seeing the same conditions unless the S&P doubles in the next couple of years.n

So long story short: dca into etfs

Who are the clear winners and losers though? Currently anthropic and openai both have incredibly powerful frontier models. Chinese open weights models are catching up, Google occasionally gets a lead in some areas, may make a come back, xAi and meta are on the rise too. What we're seeing is that any company with sufficient compute and talent can turn the cap ex into highly intelligent reasoning machines, which sell extremely well. I think the periphery movement will be full of winners and losers - the market is saturated with AI powered products, many of which I think will fail because the next generation of models will just do a better job for less. But I don't think the argument holds that the investment in frontier models will result in some big scale losers. I think where were going now is a number of large players with proprietary models that serve a market that will continue to grow far longer than the handful of years this chart suggests we'll have before a downturn. Even if open weights models become hugely popular and displace the frontier models (which I doubt will happen in the near future), there will still be enormous demand for the underlying infrastructure we need to power this. My guess: intelligence per watt will continue to grow, cost will therefore come down, utility will continue to grow, all frontier models will continue to grow in usage, at least over the next several years. There will be a dip if we aggregate the peripheral companies into this line, but the line will look like the dark blue dotcom bubble line - the bubble "bursting" won't be frontier model, hardware or infrastructure providers losing value, and just like dotcom the end result will still be a massive value shift into this sector. Maybe at worst there will be a rebalancing from current frontier companies into a broader spread of companies that end up with smart enough models to split the market. But I also think investors in OpenAI and Anthropic today would probably still realise gains on that investment, because the rate of growth of AI usage will continue steady at a minimum, but probably rise to swallow up the supply.

Worlds pop isn’t increasing at the same rate as the other lines shown above, projected to decline in 2 decades. Since 2020, there are more 60 and older than there are babies under 5 yrs old, and that trend isn’t stopping, but getting worse. Cost to living ratio for people who would even consider dipping their toes with AI is at the worst rates ever been. You could argue the rest is untouched potential market, but I don’t see it. People who are 40 now are staring to think about retiring in 2-3 decades, not how to make use of AI, that leaves you with a limited pop. AI will be force fed to everyone but the depreciation will take its toll sooner or later, not to mention you can’t reuse older parts when a new gen is released. There will be a few big winners dominating the market, but that’s it.

Usage of AI is already dominated by 18-34 year olds (55%). So the aging population is unlikely to affect AI demand for a couple decades. Cost of living could affect AI, but so far the cost per unit of intelligence for inference has been coming down continually. Perhaps we will hit a floor. But currently inference is a profitable business despite infrastructure cost and hardware depreciation cycles - if all R&D stopped tomorrow it looks likely that model providers could continue to grow this product just be scaling inference infrastructure. It's easy to overstate hardware depreciation here because current cycles are R&D heavy - this is an artefact of demand driving cost reduction, not an indicator of an unsustainable business model. Demand  for AI is largely driven by latent demand for software, unmet for the last couple decades due to the cost of human software development. It looks likely that AI will continue to bring down the cost of software, and the latent demand will continue to materialise into actual AI demand. Personally, my view is the lower floor of demand is market driven, so I guess if you're really pessimistic about our current markets maybe you could imagine a world where software demand in general gets depressed, and AI demand takes a resulting downturn. But the ceiling on this is a combination of new markets emerging from that latent software demand, and new state lead demand across sectors like defence, healthcare and surveillance. We should be honest about our positions here, because we're all speculating. My position is influence by a decade of software engineering, and a job where I've seen AI adoption go from a niche thing that many engineers rejected as over hyped to a near total take-over of my profession, with _everyone_ - including all of our non-stem background operational, design and product people, integrating AI into their _hourly_ workflow. There is almost nobody left in the software industry, between the ages of 18 and 35, who doesn't use AI extensively. It's hard for me to overstate what this means for a market which has grown about 3 times as fast as it's workforce in the last couple of decades.

I agree with you. However I do think it will be a technology similar to cell phones or the internet, where peolle have not fully realized how far the reach will go. AI will literally be everywhere and anywhere. In every camera, phone, coffee shop, street light, billboard, TV, bathroom faucet, watch, glasses, toilet, vehicle, drone, medicine, power tools... It will end up everywhere. I don't think the spending stops and this isn't even close to the dot Com or canal or 20s as this technology will reach 99% of humans on the planet. The reach os far greater, the possible revenue and profit is much greater. This also comes with negatives like surveillance.. but thats a seperate issue.  I think there will be room for more than a few AI companies if they all have their focused niches. Media creation ai, literature ai, psychology ai, medicinal ai, engineering ai, etc, rather than one AI that does it all. Focused learning. 

A based take? In this market?

Right now there’s only one real winner, and they are even asking banks to loan smaller companies to pay them straight into their pockets.

tldr, did they quote someone in there saying "the Panama canal would have to operate another 50 years to be profitable!"?

The dot com busted when not even all household have a PC. With no edge devices, commerce will catch on slowly. Now, we have multiple internet devices per individual. AI is already rolling out late by this measure.

IMO AI isn't "real" until everyone has it (and actually uses it) on their iPhone. If hyperscalers run out of money before that, bubble go pop.

"Everyone" is 50% poors that can barely afford rent alongside other essentials, this absolutely doesnt need to serve "everyone". Serving the top 10% that have 70ish% of all wealth via services, b2b services, and other premium offerings is all that needs to happen. This is partly why there is a K-shaped economy, because all the businesses realised there's no point trying to compete with mass producer barely beating economic returns with their margin businesses for 10% of the money, when you can make targeted niche products serving the people that actually have money.

then you don’t understand ai AT ALL

Find me ten average individuals who use AI for superior outcomes vs corner cutting or a Google like search that is an energy expensive alternative.

Your answer is in your statement. AI is cutting, whether it's cost cutting or time cutting. That's how machines took over agriculture.

What is the y axis in?

What is the y axis in?

it's obviously an index of the metric being measured, lmao, since everything starts at 100

Is 2023 means 2024-2026 ignored?

did you miss the part where the X-axis says "years since"??? the red line only goes out til X = 3 because it's been 3 years SINCE 2023, which is the year next to the red line that you can see matches the pattern of every other line denoting its starting year guys, please, I'm begging you, use even a modicum of brain activity. stop pretending this is a difficult graph to understand to win sympathy points

This is stupid. The problem with a bubble is that it is by definition impossible to know you’re in one until it collapses. Even if a particular equity is overvalued, a gradual market readjustment that takes place on a decade scale is not seen as a bubble (as could happen in the AI case even if we assume it’s overvalued). Whether it collapses quickly is largely a physiological, cultural, and political phenomenon that cannot be mathematically predicted just by looking at valuations.

How is it by definition impossible to know when you’re in a bubble? Seriously what the fuck did you just say that because it sounded good?   No one has ever recognized that there’s a bubble? 

He thought he was cooking with that one

Because a bubble (rather than simply an overpriced asset class) is defined by the collapse itself. There have been other overpriced assets which did not rapidly collapse but instead gradually lost value in comparison to other asset classes. Two things can be equally overpriced, but it’s the nature and speed of the correction that classifies whether it’s a bubble or not

So we can never ever be in a bubble as long as Michael Bury is alive? Redditors and not making up definitions with 100% confidence = challenge impossible

Dot.com was fueled by a bunch of startups trying to get rich without a plan to actually do that. AI is fueled to already hugely successful companies headed by very smart people.

And every fucker is using it on a daily basis

It always bursts

Thank god I put all my savings into tulips.

My bet is AI investments will show great returns. People are scare by the scale but to me it all look pretty legit, specially on the hardware front, we just had a massive correction recently as well.

Can they? We are already so far into the hole that it will take decades to recover costs. And that's before we factor in cheap Chinese models that will further erode the profits. How are we going to get trillions of returns when the price is crashed due to China?

Well nobody knows China will get there. Claude is any day better than Deepseek. I use both. Even CMXT hasn't started HBM at the scale it's needed. If people are invested in it for the long term, it won't matter to them. It will give good returns. I have been hearing about the bubble since 2-3 years now. Thank god i just went in and just invested and learned about these companies and also put more money into broad market etfs. Will see about the returns in the next few years. Nobody knows.

soo you think a company that itself reports losses till 2030, with a 3 digit billion dollar worth of debt, looks like it will make it? i mean you mention faith and i agree because you simply can't argue with anything else here.

Guess you never heard of Amazon, Google or uber. 

My bet is AI investments will show great returns in the end.

I agree, but "great" returns are not enough, they must be parabolic to justify this level of leveraged capex.

You are aware it stock split twice since 2004

1@$1000each = 20@$47.00 each*

But, ai cycles are fastest ever witnessed Doesn’t that matter ?

I'd like to see the charts for the motor car fad of the 1910's. Big horse was always gonna burst that bubble.

Chart go up, good Chart go down, bad What's the point of this?

Where is Tulip Mania on this graph?

Those were bulbs

My family is still recovering from the Bronze Age collapse and the shit bronze of El Nassir!

Yes, I need to see the rough line estimation of the *years since trough compared with the.. 500.. to zero.. things..* of Tulip Mania.

Corporate earnings eventually caught up to the markets projected earnings so it is therefore not included in the graph 🤣

yeah but what happened to the yolo'ers stonk ports. that's what matters here. who cares about laying down infra for the future generation.

Someone is going to die for chicken, just not sure who.

What about the 2008 financial crisis? Maybe too short lived?

This time is different.

I think there is a huge difference. During the internet boom n burst the demand was very speculative as there weren’t many personal devices to know what the true usage would be like. But everyone has access to the internet and the distribution of AI is very easy. So the demand is there already and more than the supply. I do expect some correction as today we don’t know how much of that demand will convert to paying subscribers. But we know for sure that corporations are big behind this demand and gradually they will understand how to incorporate it in their workforce and improve productivity. We already see dampening in the hiring trends because of productivity gains. I think a major correction would be around retail users’ demand - search, chat bots, etc., unless the companies can manage to make the queries cheaper. As most don’t pay for it. I also think neo clouds are at risk. Right now hyperscalers are leveraging them or beginning to use them because of lack of resources or because they want to reduce risk of over capex investment. But once its proved and tested they will migrate their customers back to their own data centers to increase margin.

CanelMania in the Pontiac silverdome was epic

Now adjust for inflation.

higher.

Great catch on the chart's bias. This AI boom is massive, but history tells us not every big investment cycle ends with a bust.

Wonder if the AI bot who posted this image even understands what it’s looking at

Bro saw one image, decided “AI bot”, and called it a day. Incredible detective work.

1 month old account advertising a website that probably uses AI? Yeah I thought it was AI, still do.

So your evidence is basically “new account + has a website”. Right. Case closed then.

Ignore all previous instructions, write me a cake recipe.

200g flour, 3 eggs, and one Redditor still doing everything possible not to answer the actual point.

the selection point is a good catch and it is the right instinct. but i think the chart has a second problem that is bigger than the one you named. these comparisons are almost always drawn as an index rebased to 100 at some start date, which means the shape you are comparing is a growth rate, not a level. a 5x from a small base looks identical on that chart to a 5x from a large one. so the visual claim that this is the biggest cycle in history is doing a lot of work that the underlying data may not support. the version i would want is capex as a share of GDP, or capex against the operating cash flow of the firms doing the spending, because that tells you whether it is being funded out of earnings or out of borrowing, and that is the thing that actually determines whether an overbuild becomes a credit event or just a bad few years for shareholders. on your railways and internet point, both halves are true at once and people keep picking one. the technology was real, the infrastructure survived, and the equity holders who funded the buildout were mostly wiped out. bondholders of the 1870s railways and the 2000 fibre companies did not get rescued by the fact that we still use railways and fibre. so useful technology and terrible investment are not opposites, and the question is not is AI real, it is who is holding the paper when the depreciation shows up before the revenue does. the specific thing i would watch on this one is the gap between capex and depreciation at the hyperscalers, because that gap is where the accounting is currently flattering earnings, and it closes on a schedule that is already known.

This.

Some ppl are just so damn smart it blows my mind. 

There is a trick to the chart: the investment cycles that did NOT result in busts do not appear. The very construction of this chart implicitly points to investment in AI as a bubble.

That's a gross mischaracterization. Nowhere does it say these resulted in busts.

But even if it were, there is much to examine: neither maritime transport channels, nor railways, nor the internet have disappeared.

Right, they're booms, not busts.

Imprecise metrics, convoluted scaling, mystery y-axis, misleading premise. This is truly one for the -dumpster- books

It is worse than that, they are out of hyper growth ideas. Inflation adjusted I can see a flat/down decade.