The fibre overbuild, again?

Everyone knows the story of there being way too much fibre built around the year 2000, the collapse, then how that was bought up cheap (especially by Google I believe) and helped create the internet we have today.

Before reading this post, I only had the vaguest understanding of why there was an overbuild though. Basically there were three things:

• A misreading of demand for bandwidth.
• The economics of what they were doing encouraged oversupply.
• An unforeseen improvement in technology vastly increased that inherent oversupply.

The last point is key to what could make the same thing happen in the AI buildout, with impacts of a similar kind and various winners, survivors and losers in the ecosystem.

To summarise briefly, we may be seeing the start of much faster and more efficient chips, and we'll need much less power and fewer data centres than are being built.

It's well worth a read.