Nifty Fifty was quality at any price. In 1972–73, those names traded at 40–60 times earnings. The businesses were real and the cash flows existed. The vulnerability was the multiple. When inflation rose and rates followed, the prices collapsed. Many took a decade or more to recover. A few never did.

Dot-com was different. Capital went into companies that had neither profits nor finished networks. When the money stopped, the build-out stopped. The technology was real. Most of the equity was not. The fiber that had already been laid stayed in the ground and could be lit later.

This cycle has pieces of both. It also has a physical constraint that was already binding before rates moved. The largest buyers are turning free cash flow negative to secure capacity. They are not laying passive cable. They are buying silicon that starts depreciating the day it arrives and cannot be switched on without power.

Hardware is arriving at the loading dock, while multi-year utility permitting and baseload grid interconnects lag far behind. High-voltage transformers still sit at lead times above 160 weeks. Servers sit unpowered in warehouses, generating immediate accounting drag without producing a single dollar of billable compute.

A higher rate path will pressure multiples. That is real. It does not accelerate a municipal permitting process or expand transmission capacity. In 1973, a rate move was enough to break the story. In 2000, the disappearance of speculative capital was enough. Here, the chips can keep arriving and the power connection can still lag.

Nifty Fifty had no physical grid bottleneck. Dot-com left passive fiber that could be lit later. This cycle is paying top-dollar multiples for depreciating inventory that is still waiting on the utility hookup.