For twenty-four years in foreign capitals, I watched governments chase capabilities they could neither field nor sustain, confusing hardware on a parade deck with actual sovereign weight.
The latest round of capital flowing from Nvidia to MediaTek is not merely an investment; it is a declaration of intent regarding who controls the next generation of computational infrastructure.
It is always the periphery that feels the squeeze first. We are told this AI boom—this colossal race to build computational gods—is merely an investment cycle, a necessary cost of progress.
The headlines today read like something out of a sci-fi novel—AI compute power is scarce, demand is astronomical, and private companies are spending billions just to keep the lights on.
One reads these reports—the ones detailing SpaceX’s ambitious trajectory toward 10GW of compute capacity by 2027, projecting an ARR path to $500 billion—and one cannot help but feel a familiar chill.
The market’s reaction to AMD’s Q2 earnings was less a correction and more a violent reminder of how much we are still operating on pure narrative hype.