The future runs on boring infrastructure
AI looks magical at the surface. Underneath it is power, chips, datacenters, cooling, bandwidth, and patience.
Everyone wants the future. Almost nobody wants the infrastructure bill that comes with it.
AI looks like software on the surface, but the real constraint is increasingly physical: energy, chips, datacenters, cooling, memory, bandwidth, logistics, and capital expenditure.
The model gets the headline. The substrate decides who can scale.
This is why compute culture is becoming infrastructure culture again. The next wave will not only be won by the companies with the best demos. It will be won by the companies that own the boring layers underneath the demo.
The future is rented by hype for a while. Eventually it is owned by whoever controls the base.