The Fifth AI Bottleneck
And I don’t mean a supercycle purely in a financial or economic sense. I mean a geopolitical, economic, financial, and technological supercycle.
What we are living through is, in some respects, history kicking back.
The last 30 years increasingly look like the anomaly, not the baseline. To understand what is happening now, better historical analogies may be the 1950s through the 1970s, or even the industrial buildout that began in the 1870s, rather than the software-driven cycles of the last few decades.
The reason is that, for the first time since the AI supercycle began, the major forces shaping it are visibly merging into a single reinforcing loop.
Historically, geopolitics and macroeconomics shaped the technological system from the outside. What is different now (compared to the previous three decades) is that technology, and AI in particular, is becoming embedded directly into both.
That changes the structure of the cycle.
AI is a dual-use technology. It is emerging during a period in which technological power has not yet consolidated under a single geopolitical actor. And unlike previous software cycles, its buildout requires far more than chips and data centers. It requires energy, land, grids, physical infrastructure, capital, industrial capacity, supply chains, and increasingly state involvement.
As a result, AI cannot remain a technology layer sitting on top of the economy. Its infrastructure has to become embedded into the core economic system itself.
And once that happens, the financial system has to evolve around it too.
The scale and duration of the AI buildout require new financing mechanisms, new capital structures, new relationships between governments and corporations, and ultimately a financial operating system capable of sustaining infrastructure investment on a scale we have not seen in decades.
That is the critical intersection we are reaching.
Going forward, it will become increasingly difficult to analyze the AI industry in isolation. You have to analyze four interconnected layers at once: geopolitics, macroeconomics, finance, and technology.
They are no longer independent variables. They are becoming parts of the same feedback loop.
That convergence is what I’ve been trying to describe with the idea of the AI Supercycle for years, and it is precisely why I started the AI Supercycle spin-off.
AI is no longer simply transforming the technology industry.
It is becoming part of the operating system through which geopolitical power, industrial capacity, capital, and economic growth are reorganized.
