"When the AI bubble pops"

Too many people seem to believe that the AI bubble popping means something like "the total volume of the activity will precipitously drop and whole centers will be abandoned forever".

I don't believe that. I was an adult when the dot-com bubble popped. What happened then was that a lot of unsound businesses went under, and the healthier players (like Amazon) expanded into the resulting void. Ultimately, the relentless march of digital technology didn't even slow down back then, although the inflow of risk capital definitely did. But the existing resources were mostly taken over by someone else.

If/when the current bubble bursts, it will be similar. All that infrastructure will be resold and re-rented to healthier players. By now, machine learning has reached a level of usability/maturity which is genuinely useful and the economy at large won't abandon it any more than it abandoned e-mail or WWW back then.