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dr_dshiv • today at 9:56 AM • 1 reply • view on HN

“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?


Replies

etiennebausson • today at 11:02 AM

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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