Infrastructure lessons from the dot-com bubble

Underneath a busy street in Menlo Park, California, around the corner from the coffee shop I worked at as a teen, is a series of fiber optic cables laid out during the dot com boom.

There, we met Paul Vixie, a vice president and distinguished engineer at AWS Security. But Vixie is also an early internet innovator who helped lay a lot of that same fiber, lying under the manholes on that street.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Vixie for a history lesson, as part of our ongoing series about AI infrastructure.

Back in the early 2000s when those cables were being laid, telecommunication companies were also spending billions of dollars to build out fast and reliable internet infrastructure betting on bigger returns.

“That was very much the feeling is we got to do everything we can within the limits of the law and the laws of physics, but we got to do everything possible to get this built as quickly as possible, because that's how the winners and losers are going to sort themselves out,” Vixie said.

But as everyone knows, the dot-com boom went bust and in the wake of bankruptcies of telecoms and tech firms alike, layers of unused internet cables remained.

The Federal Communications Commission estimated that by 2007, about two-thirds of the 45 million miles were still “dark.”

But years later, that fiber infrastructure supported the next cycle of the internet economy - search engines, social media, streaming video, cryptocurrency and now AI.

“We now have enough fiber that anybody who wants to do something can do it,” Vixie said. “I think all of the investments that were made have ultimately paid off, even if you know, some of the companies represented on these manhole covers had to go through bankruptcy on the way.”

So even if the short term didn’t end well for various companies and the people involved, ultimately that dot-com infrastructure was used for all kinds of things.

“I'm betting that of the 12 conduits that each of these companies put into the hole in the ground where these  manholes are, they're probably not even half full yet,” Vixie added. “So the future is effectively unlimited for what can be done with an information economy in the next 50 years.”

Vixie doesn’t think the current companies involved in the AI infrastructure buildout are as vulnerable as the dot com companies that went under. Ultimately, he says AI will continue to evolve regardless of what happens in this current AI boom.