The incentive for CEOs is announcing the plan to do something, they have no idea if they will actually be able to do it, and it probably won't matter.

This happened in the dotcom too btw. Companies built out fibre networks, it wasn't possible to actually build all the physical infra that companies wanted to build so many announced plans that never happened and then, towards the end, companies began aggressively acquiring stakes in companies who were building stuff to get financial exposure (an example was BT, which turned itself briefly into a hedge fund with a telephone network attached...before it imploded).

CEOs do not operate on the timescale of waiting and building. Their timescale is this year's bonus/share options package. Nothing else matters: announce plans to do X or Y, doesn't matter, they know they will be gone long before it happens.

It took about 10 months to get 200k GPUs going in xAI data centers. Given the stuff has been being announced for the past 2 years, we shall see how they’re going within the next year.

I think this was definitely true of CEOs in the past but Google and Meta have managed spectacular infrastructure buildouts over many decades with proper capacity planning.

There were a lot of lessons learned in the dotcom boom (mainly related to the great telecom heist if you ask me). If you look back on why there was dotcom bubble it's broadly, imho, related to the terrible network quality in the US compared to other first world countries.

Our cellular services for example lag behind basically every asian market by at least 1 maybe 2 generations now.