Fuck AI

It's different this time.

... says every bubble, ever.

Having lived through the dot-com bubble in real time as a professional, allow me to draw the following comparisons:

You know all those huge figures about investments you hear? That’s not debt and low interest blending. That’s real cash investment.

This couldn't be farther from the truth. Here's a great read, but the long and short of it is that this is entirely based on debt and smoke-and-mirrors.

they’re booked out before the ground is broken

On the premise that they will be needed, and that the companies ordering them will be solvent when they're completed. These big AI companies have limited runway, and the data centers they need won't be available until after the runway is gone.

Data centers and power generation are IRL investments that are needed whether it’s for AI use or not

Power generation, maybe. That's like all the fiber that MCI laid before they went tits-up in an accounting scandal of their own making, due entirely to creating a thing that nobody needed yet. Yeah, it's useful now (several decades later) but it was speculatively created without a way to pay for it. These ai-specific data centers cannot be repurposed for regular servers, short of gutting the whole thing. Add to this that the chips used for LLMs cannot be repurposed for anything else, and are practically obsolete by the time they're installed.

Also, there aren’t a smaller set of goods everyone is after, like paying $1 million for toys.com, a URL never worth anything close to the hype.

There are dozens (probably way more) of new "AI" companies being created every day in the hopes of being scooped up by the big players. This is exactly the same as the dot-com boom. Create a cool-sounding company with an idea and a shell of a copycat idea, sell to rube investors, rinse and repeat. This is just as bad, if not worse than it was before.

2 of them are solid and so far 2 are not anything like a bubble ready to pop.

Which 2 of them are solid? Even if that were the case, one leg will come out from the stool (or 2 or 3) and the whole thing will topple. They're all dependent on each other with fake money and promises, and it's a matter of time. I'm saying sooner rather than later, but who knows.