“This is Not Your Dad’s dot-com Bubble”

Google is tiptoeing toward the $4 trillion club, where Nvidia and Apple already hang out like smug pioneers on Mount Capitalization. Alphabet didn’t get here by squeezing more ads into search results or forcing you to watch 10 seconds of raid-game trailers before YouTube videos. The rocket fuel is AI, and its trajectory makes the dot-com bubble look like a middle-school science fair.

Picture three worlds

• World 1: The internet boom. People bought pets.com stock, burned money on eyeballs and clicks, and called Aeron chairs “infrastructure.” The physical footprint was a couple server racks and, maybe, an undersea cable. When it collapsed, the economy sneezed and moved on.

• World 2: Crypto. Meme coins, influencers, Robinhood screenshots. A casino with more GPUs than Vegas. When it crashed, retail investors tweeted in all caps and life returned to normal.

• World 3: AI. This one is industrial. Not metaphorically industrial, but physically industrial. Data centers are devouring land, power, water, and enough chips to make a Bond villain blush. Utilities warn of grid shortages. Entire supply chains are bending around cooling systems, transformers, and trenching contracts. It’s less “app store” and more “building the Hoover Dam.”

And it’s not grandma trading Doge. Corporate America is doing the spending. Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta will blow almost $400 billion in capex this year. Cloud lenders, private credit, and bond markets are all tied to compute hardware that depreciates faster than a new car leaving the dealership. If loans get called, the dominoes don’t fall on crypto bros. They fall on corporate balance sheets, bondholders, construction crews, and your retirement index fund.

AI has already propped up half of 2025’s GDP growth. It isn’t hiring armies of employees, it’s compressing labor. The system is now so intertwined with the boom that a collapse might not be allowed to happen. AI has essentially become too big to fail.

Bullet Snapshots of the Five Points

In Catherine Baab’s Quartz Media blog “This is not your dad’s dot-com bubble”, her reasoning for dropping your fight or flight red alarms are:

• AI is physical
  This boom isn’t browsers and banner ads. It’s megawatts, land, water, and industrial buildouts that look like new national infrastructure.

• AI is financed by corporations
  Not retail speculation. Corporate balance sheets, bond markets, and private credit are financing compute like factories.

• AI is propping up GDP
  Remove AI investment and U.S. growth is cut roughly in half. The boom lives in macro data, not hype.

• AI isn’t creating jobs
  Data centers employ dozens, not thousands. AI augments existing roles instead of spawning new industries.

• If the bubble pops, it hits the system
  Corporate capex falls, debt markets feel shock, construction slows, and everyone with index funds takes a hit.

Read Catherine’s article on Quartz!