Ben Bajarin
CEO and Principal Analyst at Creative Strategies, a technology research firm, covering semiconductors, AI infrastructure and product adoption.
“Dot-com, railways, cars, I mean, electricity, name a transformational technology. You had to wait for adoption for those to scale. … This is different. Everyone can use it right now with existing hardware. There's no adoption cycle of new costly hardware or things, widgets, to drive this cycle. It can be used today.”
The Circuit · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026
Bajarin, chip analyst and co-host of The Circuit, on why he gives the AI buildout more benefit of the doubt than earlier mega-cycles. In earlier booms, people first had to wire a house or buy a computer or phone; here the bottleneck is building enough compute and energy to serve billions of daily users.
Transcript
year where we won't have enough
gas turbines, right? Just because you look at the production schedules, they can't produce enough.
…you had to have your house wired. You had to spend money or you had to buy a new house in order to go get that, right? Or in the dot-com phase, you had to get a computer that you didn't own that costs thousands of dollars and then sign up for a plan. And so people had to go get hardware. Kind of mobile was the same thing, right? In telco, you had to go get a phone in order to use the backbone. This is different. Everyone can use it right now with existing hardware. There's no adoption cycle of new costly hardware or things, widgets, to drive this cycle. It can be used today. And that's why I think this is a very interesting time, which compounds demand because it's freely available for everybody to use in some capacity. You just have to start using it. And that's a very different thing. And I think that's why we keep talking about, and you hear everybody talk about demand is there. We're actually building to meet the daily use of billions of people who could use it…
That's a little concerning to me because if you think about the internet boom bubble, a big factor there was people had big plans and grand ambitions. A lot of companies built up on the idea that they could do all kinds of interesting things. And the problem was the infrastructure wasn't there.…
and I think my bigger concern is that in that is as you start to roll this out to your employees and all of the things that government officials, whatever, whoever your customer base is, are they frustrated, like you said, because it's slow or it's costly or it's X, Y, or Z. Does it not deliver the…
Yeah, but I just think of sort of the basic functionality of the web, things that we take for granted today. You know, think about like JavaScript, right? The 1990s web didn't have JavaScript. Today, it's like built into every website. We don't even think about it. You're able to do all kinds of…
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