Gavin Baker: 97% of fiber sat idle in 2000, but no top GPU sits idle today
gerardsans · x · 2026-10-19
Investor Gavin Baker pushes back on the popular "AI bubble = 2000 dot-com crash" analogy:
- At the 2000 peak, roughly 97% of US dark fiber lay unused underground — telecom built thousands of times more capacity than software could consume, and capital collapsed
- Today, you can hardly find an idle top-tier GPU in any datacenter; chips run at full load, and the real bottlenecks are power and cooling
The quoter adds that speculators will be casualties as the hype music ends — "just be sure to sit on a chair before the music stops." This supply-demand contrast is one of the strongest counterarguments in the current bubble debate.
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