GPU Gold Rush 1849 meets AI in a direct comparison with the real California Gold Rush. We trace money flows from miners to merchants—then and now—to reveal how scarcity, logistics, and chokepoints determine who profits. Topics include picks and shovels vs GPUs, HBM memory, advanced packaging, interconnect, power and cooling, cloud capacity, and the shift from hype to discipline through distillation, quantization, and caching. This is economic history applied to modern compute—no predictions, no financial advice.