Why AI And The Future
The capability curve has bent — and the unit of AI work shifted from prompt to agent loop.
Frontier Capability · 2022 → 2027
Vibe → Agentic → Independent → Autonomous
Pretraining scaling slowed in 2024; test-time compute reopened the curve. Five open families (DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, GLM, Mistral) now sit within six months of the closed frontier.
The Four-Way Capex War Subsidising Your Inference
Internet buildout took decades. Cloud transition: 15 years. This is happening in 36 months. You are buying frontier intelligence below cost while the platform fight is unresolved.
$500B · 4-yr build
Announced Jan 2025. $100B deploying immediately; ~7 GW capacity and $400B+ committed by late 2025.
$725B · 2026E
Up from ~$200B in 2024 and $315–340B in 2025. Each major spends more per quarter than entire S&P 500 industries earn at peak.
$852B · $122B raised
Anthropic: $380B Feb 2026, talks for $900B+ in May. xAI: $230B Jan 2026. Three rivals near a trillion, none yet profitable.
$115B · +142% YoY
Single segment, single year. $35.6B in Q4 alone. US data-centre power: 80 GW (2025) → ~150 GW (2028).