skip to content
The Weighted Average

Compute & Market Power

Chips, cloud capacity, data centers, energy, capex, and the supply chains that determine who can build AI.

The AI race ultimately reaches the physical world: accelerators, memory, fabs, networking, data centers, electricity, cooling, and the financing required to assemble them. This topic explains how those constraints shape model availability, cloud competition, national strategy, and the bargaining power of builders.

Coverage follows the stack from semiconductor materials and export controls to hyperscaler capex and grid queues. The goal is to make infrastructure legible as an operating constraint and a source of market power—not to treat every chip launch or data-center announcement as an isolated event.