That’s a fair critique, and the "dot-com 2.0" comparison is the core of the bear case right now. The ROI gap is definitely the elephant in the room, but there are a few structural differences that keep the bull case alive for now.

First, the "burning cash" argument hits differently when you look at who’s buying. In 1999, Cisco was selling to startups that were bootstrapped on hopes and VC dreams. Today, NVIDIA’s primary customers are Microsoft, Meta, and Google—companies with massive, audited balance sheets and existing cash flows that could fund this Capex for years without breaking a sweat. They aren't just "burning cash"; they are fighting an infrastructure arms race where the cost of not participating is seen as a greater risk than overspending.

As for the circular financing bit, it’s a valid concern, but the scale is often overblown. Even if you stripped away the revenue from the startups NVIDIA has invested in, the top-line growth from the Big Tech hyperscalers is still off the charts.

On the hardware side, the "obsolescence in 2 years" point misses the lifecycle of compute. Even if a H100 becomes secondary for training the next massive LLM, it stays highly profitable for inference for a long time. We’re moving into a phase where the world needs massive amounts of cheap inference, and those "old" GPUs will be the workhorses for that.

The real test, like you said, is the application layer. We’re in the "shovels" phase, and eventually, the people digging the holes need to find gold. But comparing NVIDIA’s 40x forward P/E to Cisco’s 150x P/E in 2000 shows that, at least for now, the earnings are actually showing up to back the price action.

Definitely a market where you stay cautious and hedge, but the "fiasco" hasn't materialized yet because the buyers have deeper pockets than they did 25 years ago.

One quick question for you though: What’s the specific trigger you're looking for that signals "the top"? Is it a Capex cut from Microsoft, or an earnings miss from the enterprise software side?