Almost every major capital spending boom during the past 200 years has ended in bankruptcies, consolidations, and tears—but also wins for the victors.
The late 1990s buildout of fiber-optic networks, in which companies spent billions to pull dark fiber across continents and under oceans, saw borrowers like WorldCom, Global Crossing, and others go under. The shale revolution that prompted U.S. oil and gas companies to issue $350 billion in debt to fund drilling led to hundreds of bankruptcies after oil prices swooned in 2014 and 2015. Going back even further to the early 1900s, the widespread adoption of electric power led to a buildout that saw roughly half of the 3,000 small utilities and power companies that existed either disappear or get sold during a brutal decade of consolidation. In each case, there were also long-term victors who inherited infrastructure and reaped the benefits of these expansions in the form of lower-cost bandwidth, cheaper consumer prices, and large manufacturers that consolidated the power grid.
