The age of software supremacy is ending as artificial intelligence is making it abundant. The cognitive labour that once commanded enormous salaries and generated enormous profit margins is being automated, compressed, and eventually commoditised. When intelligence is cheap, the scarce things become physical again: energy, materials, fabrication capacity, and the infrastructure.
The world is fracturing into competing technological blocs, each of which must now build its own semiconductor supply chain, its own energy independence, its own defence-industrial base. Re-shoring is a capital programme of historic scale, and it will overpay for physical capacity located within trusted jurisdictions for the entire duration of the transition.
The companies that own the energy, the critical minerals, the advanced manufacturing, the compute infrastructure, and the defence systems of the democratic world are being systematically underpriced by investors still calibrated to a globalised, software-led order.
“When intelligence becomes abundant, scarcity migrates. It migrates into energy, materials, manufacturing capacity, and the physical infrastructure of computation itself.”