The world is entering a new innovation cycle. Electricity in the 1920s, oil in the 1950s, and the internet in the 1990s all began as speculative infrastructure booms before turning into public utilities and, later, productivity revolutions. Artificial intelligence follows the same pattern. It starts with a closed circuit of corporate investment, moves through a monopoly phase, and will end as a public good built on national compute and energy grids.
At the core of the current AI hype there are still no profits, only capital loops. Nvidia sells hardware to OpenAI and its peers, financed by Microsoft, Oracle, and others. Those same partners then book cloud revenue from leasing that hardware back to the AI labs. It’s circular accounting: the same money is recycled through different balance sheets. This is not an income-generating system but a balance-sheet expansion, very similar to the rail or electrification manias of past industrial transitions. What is being built now is the infrastru…
