> Fiber and railroads don't need tens of billions of dollars in continuing yearly maintenance expenses to keep them from going stale.

Congrats, you're as qualified as all the private equity companies that have been piling into railroads!

That's precisely the sort of attitude that got us East Palestine (and others.)

BNSF (for example) spends billions of dollars a year on maintenance. When trains go over rails enough it can mess with the ballast and they have to come through with machines that lift the rail and jiggle the ballast and place the rail back at the correct height. And non-concrete ties have to be replaced every so often. Signals need maintenance. Switches need maintenance. Sensor/scanner shacks need maintenance. Etc.

Railroads have been dramatically cutting back because of pressure from PE, so the estimate is probably low.

>Fiber and railroads don't depreciate after 3 years of use like AI chips.

Are you seriously arguing that infrastructure doesn't depreciate? Tell me you've never done anything other than push bits, without telling me. Fiber gets eaten by backhoes trying to show off to potential mates in the spring, washed out, run over, knocked down by drunk drivers (if on telephone poles, not all of it is buried), has to be relocated because of other works, suffers water intrusion, amplifiers fail, you name it.

Infrastructure depreciates!

More slowly and with less expense in relative terms than an LLM model.

You get a lot more bang from your buck from a 10 year old set of under-maintained railroad tracks than you do from a 10 year old unmaintained LLM.

To compare the depreciation or ongoing maintenance expense of the two as apples to apples is ludicrous. To equate the capital expenditure and long term value of the two as equal is also ridiculous.