There is a deeper misclassification beneath the 2000-versus-2008 question, and it is the one that does the real damage. The market is pricing AI as a technology cycle when its actual anatomy is that of a credit-driven real estate cycle - which is precisely why the 2008 mechanics apply - and the two break for entirely different reasons.

Technology cycles are driven by innovation and adoption; their risks are obsolescence and competition; they live or die on whether the product is wanted, and they can de-rate slowly as the future is repriced.

Real estate cycles are mechanical: leverage, hard assets, occupancy - debt-financed construction at scale, commercial leases disguised as take-or-pay contracts, and long construction lags that guarantee supply arrives after demand has turned. Walk down the AI build-out and every feature is a property development in disguise: a data center on entitled land, financed with debt against the structure and leased to tenants on take-or-pay terms. This is not a software business that happens to own servers. It is a real estate business that happens to compute.

Real estate cycles break the same way every single time. Not when demand collapses - it rarely does - but when the rate of demand growth decelerates against the fixed supply the boom has just finished building. The second derivative again, in the one asset class where it has been studied for a century.