One difference that strikes me with the .com bubble is that I don't remember the .com companies having sustained multi-billions losses / cash burn. They were not profitable but this is quite different. If (or when) the music stops, won't OpenAI go bust immediately? That's quite a counterparty risk those companies are taking.
Cisco was very much not "stuff like pets.com". Most of the money lost in the dotcom crash wasn't in pets.com, it was the infrastructure companies like Cisco and Sun.
I believe we'd have to tease out what proportion of that cash burn is essential to keep serving compute to customers (which I assume to have profitable unit economics), versus what percentage is optional datacenter buildouts that could be paused in this situation.
Massive cash burn was an absolutely key feature of the dotcom boom/bust. Admittedly, it never really went away - there's always been a free->enshittification profit taking cycle since then. It's just the scale that's terrifyingly different this time.
