The rapid growth of artificial intelligence has led to warnings from some observers of a “bubble” destined to burst, but tech leaders say there’s good reason to believe the sector won’t suffer the same fate as the dot-com crash of the early 2000s.

There are key differences between the application of AI infrastructure still being built and the internet boom of the late 1990s, said Nvidia senior vice-president of networking Kevin Deierling. Back then, everything needed to be built from scratch and companies weren’t immediately ready to use the technology.

“There was a lag,” said Deierling, speaking in Toronto on Wednesday alongside other tech sector executives on the sidelines of the Cisco Connect conference.

“All of a sudden I have all this bandwidth for the internet and the dot-com era,

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