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skywhopper 3 days ago

Really tired of seeing the story about how, “sure Worldcom et al went bankrupt but their investments in fiber optics gave us the physical infrastructure of the Internet today.”

I mean, sort of, but the fiber optics in the ground have been upgraded several by orders of magnitude of its original capacity by replacing the transceivers on either end. And the fiber itself has lasted and will continue to last for decades.

Neither of those properties is true of the current datacenter/GPU boom. The datacenter buildings may last a few decades but the computers and GPUs inside will not and they cannot be easily amplified in their value as the fiber in the ground was.