If you squint, the AI boom in 2025 looks like a mash-up of every infrastructure mania America has ever seen. The railroad boom of the 1800s. The electrification push in the roaring 1920s. The fiber internet mania of the late 1990s.
Each era had the same three ingredients: breathless enthusiasm, an overbuilt network, and—after the crash—a foundation that quietly powered the next several decades of economic growth.
