The Bubble Question
Railroad boom, dot-com rerun, or the real thing? The arguments, attributed.
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Skeptics cite the gap between capex and current revenue, circular deals (chipmakers investing in their customers), and historical parallels — even Sam Altman said in 2025 that investors as a whole are 'overexcited' while insisting the underlying technology is real, and an MIT study's '95% of AI pilots fail' line became shorthand for enterprise disappointment. Believers answer with usage curves, compute scarcity, and the precedent that railroad and fiber busts still left the infrastructure that powered the next boom. This page keeps score of claims, not verdicts.
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Record reviewed as of 2026-01-15 — see Methodology.