Mark Cuban: ‘A Lot of Data Centers Are Going To Be Turned Into Pickleball Courts’
Mark Cuban sold Broadcast.com at the peak of the dot-com boom, so when he warns that billions in AI infrastructure spending could end up repurposed for pickleball, investors who remember 1999 might want to pay attention.
Billionaire investor Mark Cuban has a new metaphor for the AI infrastructure boom, and it doubles as a plug for one of his side projects. On the latest episode of the All-In podcast, Cuban predicted that “a lot of data centers… are going to be turned into pickleball courts” if AI models and hardware keep getting more efficient. The line lands harder given that Cuban co-owns the Dallas Flash pickleball team. The underlying argument is one that investors tracking both the “AI bubble” narrative and the “AI infrastructure overbuild” thesis should take seriously.
Cuban brings dot-com-era operator credibility to this debate. He sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in April 1999, right before the market imploded. That timing lends his overbuild warning real weight, even if the pickleball punchline is doing most of the work on social media.
The Efficiency Argument
Cuban’s core view is that hyperscalers like Meta and Alphabet are right to expect AI usage will keep climbing, but that “technological breakthroughs” will make AI dramatically cheaper and more power-efficient. If that happens, much of the computing capacity being poured into the ground today will prove far larger than demand ever required.
His historical analogy is the late-1990s fiber-optic buildout. Telecoms overbuilt long-haul networks, connection speeds then improved, and in Cuban’s telling “there wasn’t a bandwidth problem anymore.” He expects a similar price-performance curve to play out in AI compute. On Big Tech’s practice of spending all available cash flow on capital expenditures, then borrowing on top of that, Cuban called it “planning for perfection, and that’s going to be hard,” adding that “nobody can predict that well.”
The comments were reported by Business Insider’s Theron Mohamed on July 22, 2026.
A Different Kind of Bubble, in Cuban’s View
Cuban is careful to separate overbuild risk from outright mania. He argues the AI boom is “not the traditional dot-com bubble” because far fewer companies are going public at “crazy valuations” with “no revenue, no traffic, no nothing,” and none of the retail-frenzy signals (cab drivers pitching internet stocks, for instance) that defined 2000 are visible today.
Where the pain would show up, in his framing, is narrower and more institutional. Cuban argued the damage would be concentrated: it “could just destroy a lot of VCs and a lot of funds and a lot of PE” that have gone all-in on AI infrastructure bets, while sparing “most people across the US.” The distinction matters: this is a warning aimed at sophisticated capital allocators, not at retail investors holding index funds.
He Is Not Alone
Other prominent skeptics have reached similar conclusions by different routes. Michael Burry has warned that Big Tech is overinvesting in chips and data centers that could quickly become obsolete. GMO co-founder Jeremy Grantham has called AI “obviously a bubble,” saying it “meets every condition of the railroads and the Internet” as a transformational technology that still drew reckless overinvestment. All three see AI as genuinely transformative. Their shared argument is that the capex math assumes a demand curve history has rarely delivered.
What the Market Is Saying Right Now
The current market is running hard in the other direction. Super Micro Computer (NASDAQ:SMCI | SMCI Price Prediction) disclosed over $60 billion in new orders and a record backlog in a preliminary fiscal Q4 2026 business update filed with the SEC on July 21, 2026. The company guided gross margin to 15-17%, well above its prior guidance of 8.2%-8.4%, and the stock jumped 24% on the news. When Supermicro reported full Q4 results on August 11, the gross margin came in at an actual 17.5%, and the company guided full fiscal year 2027 revenue to between $65 billion and $72 billion, far above analyst expectations. Bank of America is telling clients that wafer fab equipment spending will surge from $144 billion in 2026 to $250 billion by 2028. OpenAI plans to dramatically increase compute spending through 2030, and Microsoft recently signed a multi-billion-dollar agreement to rent computing capacity from Mistral’s European data centers.
That is exactly the “planning for perfection” Cuban is warning about. Whether it ends in more revenue or more pickleball courts is the question every AI-infrastructure investor should be stress-testing right now.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to include Super Micro Computer’s confirmed Q4 fiscal 2026 results, reported August 11, 2026, including an actual gross margin of 17.5% and full fiscal year 2027 revenue guidance of $65 billion to $72 billion. The preliminary SEC filing referenced in the original article has been corrected from a 10-K to the 8-K business update filed July 21, 2026.
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