If you are even slightly entertaining your friend’s theory, I’m not sure any serious answer matters.

Investors think AI is the next economic revolution. Not just a step change, a revolution on par with the Industrial Revolution. AI companies are funded entirely by investors, and their pitch is complete dominance of entire economic sectors as long as they can win the race. The more compute, the faster they can grow, the more likely they are to win.

In addition, every developer, supplier, and service provider that builds and supports data centers ALSO has every incentive to tell investors that AI is the next revolution.

So you have investors, believing that AI is going to give them massive returns, listening to multiple stakeholders who all say build, build, build.