I just hope when (if) the hype is over, we can repurpose the capacities for something useful (e.g. drug discovery etc.)
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After the dotcom crash, much of this infrastructure became distressed assets that could be picked up for peanuts. This fueled a large number of new startups in the aftermath that built business models figuring out how to effectively leverage all of this dead fiber when you don't have to pay the huge capital costs of building it out yourself. At the time, you could essentially build a nationwide fiber network for a few million dollars if you were clever, and people did.
These new data centers will find a use, even if it ends up being by some startup who picks it up for nothing after a crash. This has been a pattern in US tech for a long time. The carcass of the previous boom's whale becomes cheap fuel for the next generation of companies.
When a few years ago I moved from Eastern Europe (where I had 1GB/s to my apartment for years) to the UK I was surprised that "the best" internet connection I was able to get was about 40MBit/s phone line. But it's a small town, and during past years even we have fiber up to 2GB/s now.
I'm surprised US still has issues that you mentioned. Have you considered Starlink(fuck Musk, but the product is decent)/alternatives?
One is, of course, the size of the country, but that's hardly an "excuse." It does contribute though.
The other big reason is lack of competition in the ISP space, and this is compounded by a distinctly American captured system where the owners/operators of the "public" utility poles shut out new entrants and have no incentive to improve the situation.
Meanwhile the nationwide regulatory agencies have been stripped down and courts have de-toothed them, reducing likelihood of top-down reform, and often these sorts of problems inevitably end up running into the local and state government vs national government split that is far more severe in the US.
So it's one of those problems that is surprising to some degree, but when you read about things like public utility telephone poles captured by corporate interests, it's also distinctly ridiculous and American, and not surprising at all.