Every impressive demo sits on a stack that is physical: wafers, water, transformers, and fiber.
Scarcity moved down the stack
For a decade, cloud felt infinite. Then training runs started booking entire data halls, and the bottleneck became power interconnects and advanced packaging, not clever Python.
Nations now talk about compute the way they once talked about oil refineries. Export controls, foundry capacity, and who can cool a megawatt in a given zip code are industrial policy with a new vocabulary.
What builders should do
Design for scarcity. Cache more. Distill models. Put inference closer to users. The romantic idea of one giant brain in one giant region is giving way to a messier, more local map.
The companies that win will treat energy and chips as product constraints, not as someone else's problem.
