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Start free trial →a16z Podcast · Startups & Venture · November 2026
Asked how he reads the AI buildout against the late-90s fiber boom, Volpi said the fiber proved useful but ended up owned by someone else after the debt-laden builders went bankrupt. He expects the same split here: the compute will be used, but ownership will change after a correction.
…are not good enough. And then that ripples through the industry. And ultimately, the players that were most saddled with debt went bankrupt. Now, it's interesting to note that debt was buying assets, those fiber optic cables. And those assets actually turned out to be quite useful in the future.
Exactly.
Except they were operated by somebody else because the guys that went bankrupt didn't have them anymore. So the first thing to recognize is that the underlying assets that were built at the time was bandwidth, and I suspect this compute this time. It'll be useful. There's no question that it'll be useful. Whether it will be owned by the same companies or not is an interesting economic question. So that's a long-winded answer to say: do I think the build out that's happening now is useful and will be fully utilized, if not more, 100%. Will it be owned by the same people that own it today? A lot of interesting dependencies and a lot of things that, in fact, are outside of the control because they're macroeconomic and geopolitical and so forth. It's really outside of the control of the builders themselves. And in particular, when I talk about the builders, some of the balance sheets are pretty healthy, right? Last count, when I was talking to folks at NVIDIA, there are 200 neo-clouds, and those balance sheets are not good.
Yes.
So I'll predict that there will be some.
Of course.