Investor Gavin Baker: 2000's 97% dark fiber vs today's fully-loaded GPUs
AYi_AInotes · x · 2026-10-19
- Silicon Valley investor Gavin Baker pushed back on the popular "AI bubble = dot-com bubble" analogy: at the 2000 telecom peak, 97% of laid fiber in the US was dark—over 90% never even powered on—while today you can't find a single idle top-tier GPU anywhere; every chip runs hot at full load.
- The two booms differ physically: hollow bubbles leave assets rotting in warehouses with demand existing only in pitch decks; real industrial revolutions see demand overwhelm capacity as every piece of hardware depreciates around the clock. Today's bottleneck is cooling and power, not idle compute.
- His take: respect market froth, but don't mistake real technical load for a mirage—as long as core assets run at 100% utilization, the riskiest move is calling the era over prematurely.
- The poster adds that their internal automation and knowledge-base API usage doubles monthly.
- The post also quotes a Ben Horowitz story about Loudcloud (bandwidth crashing from $1,500 to $50 per megabit after 1999), cautioning that compute middlemen's arbitrage is fragile—presenting both bullish and cautious angles.
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