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As another example of that, consider the dot-com bubble: the internet didn't go away when the companies failed.
The comparisons to the dot com and railroad bubbles concern me sometimes.
A railroad line can last centuries if properly maintained. Fiber has a 20 - 50 year lifespan. They were both totally usable by the time everyone finally got over the mania. I'm not sure the same is going to be true about GPUs. The data center physical structures will exist, and maybe the power infrastructure, but even the (IMHO optimistic) projections on GPUs show a 6 year depreciation schedule.
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No, but most of the companies that went bust weren't ISPs but ancillary companies that had nothing to do with the Internet itself. Telecom definitely took a hit, but thatbwas due to optimistic demand projections that led to infrastructure build out that wasn't needed, not because they weren't charging customers enough. The current situation is like if they did what they did while offering everyone free access while undercharging people for faster connections. In any event, that build out was based largely on what the technology could already do, not what it theoretically might be able to do in the future. The money also wasn't nearly as much. The current situation is like if the ISPs were spending ten times as much money and were all unprofitable, and traditional telecom companies providing the same service were all losing money on it. In that case it's likely that Internet service would become hard to come by and expensive after the crash and it would have delayed the technilogy's adoption.
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