By Channah Yurovsky, Staff Writer
In my previous article last semester, “Will AI Take Our Jobs Completely — or Just Change Them?” I argued that artificial intelligence (AI) is unlikely to replace human value altogether, but it will fundamentally reshape what employers value. Returning to my internship at Alliance Global Partners this summer, where I’ve been working alongside compliance and operations, I found myself asking a different question: If AI is changing the workplace so quickly, where else is it shifting the balance of power?
For centuries, power was measured by territory, military strength, natural resources and economic output. Today, some of the world’s most valuable assets cannot be mined from the ground or pumped from beneath it; they are built on computing power, advanced semiconductors, cloud infrastructure, satellite networks and artificial intelligence. Somewhere along the way, the definition of power secretly began to change.
While the public debates about which chatbot writes the better essay, investors, governments and corporations are pouring unprecedented amounts of capital towards the infrastructure that makes those systems possible. Earlier this year, OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle and other partners reaffirmed plans to invest up to $500 billion through the Stargate Project to build AI infrastructure across the United States, arguing that computing capacity has become a matter of economic growth and national security.
Maybe we’ve been asking the wrong questions all along. Instead of asking whether AI will replace us, perhaps we should be asking: Who stands to gain the most power because of it?
History has a funny way of repeating itself. During the California Gold Rush (1848–1855), hundreds of thousands of prospectors traveled west hoping to strike it rich. While a fortunate few struck gold, many left with little or nothing. Some of the greatest fortunes, however, were made by merchants who supplied the miners with the picks, shovels, clothing, transportation and other necessities that made the rush possible. Samuel Brannan, often considered California’s first millionaire, built his fortune not by mining gold, but by selling supplies to those who did. Levi Strauss similarly transformed a business selling durable clothing to miners into what would become one of America’s most recognizable brands, Levi’s.
History also has a habit of rewarding the people nobody is paying attention to. The winners weren’t always the people searching for gold; more often they were the people who built the economy surrounding it. Artificial intelligence seems to be writing a remarkably similar story. The miners changed history. The suppliers built fortunes.
Consumers recognize AI assistants ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini because they’re the products we interact with every day. Investors, however, are looking somewhere else entirely. Their attention and billions of dollars are flowing towards the companies quietly building the infrastructure beneath them. Nvidia recently became one of the world’s most valuable publicly traded companies, propelled largely by extraordinary demand for the graphics processing units (GPUs) that power today’s AI revolution. Nvidia isn’t valuable because people suddenly started playing more video games. It’s valuable because modern AI cannot function without the chips it designs. Wall Street’s enthusiasm is not simply about chatbots; it reflects a broader belief that computing infrastructure has become one of the most strategically valuable assets in the global economy.
OpenAI itself has shifted its attention beyond building better models. Through its Stargate initiative, it is investing in the computing capacity, energy infrastructure, and data centers required to support the next generation of artificial intelligence. In other words, the race is no longer about who can create the smarter AI, but about building the infrastructure that AI requires.
But why would software companies suddenly care about electricity?
The first Industrial Revolution rewarded whoever controlled coal. The twentieth century rewarded those who controlled oil. The internet rewarded those who controlled information. Artificial intelligence seems to be rewarding a different factor: compute.
Compute — the immense processing power required to train and run artificial intelligence models — has quietly become one of the world’s most valuable resources. Unlike previous technological revolutions, AI cannot exist without enormous amounts of specialized computer chips, electricity, cloud infrastructure and data centers. Artificial intelligence is no longer just software. It has become physical infrastructure.
This helps explain why NVIDIA has become one of the most closely watched companies on Wall Street. The company’s GPUs, originally designed for video games, have become the backbone of AI development. Today, nearly every major frontier AI developer (including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta) depends on high-performance chips to train increasingly sophisticated models. Investors are betting on the infrastructure powering an entirely new technological era beyond artificial intelligence, one that includes the companies that every artificial intelligence company depends on.
Chips are only one piece of the much larger puzzle. Artificial intelligence requires enormous amounts of electricity, hyperscale data centers, cloud infrastructure, global communication networks and cooperation between governments and private industry. There is no AI without energy.
None of this means that governments are suddenly becoming obsolete. Countries still write laws, regulate markets, maintain militaries, negotiate alliances and control monetary policy. In fact, the rapid rise of artificial intelligence has pushed governments further into the conversation, not out of it. The European Union’s AI Act, American restrictions on advanced semiconductor exports and the growing global race to lead AI development all demonstrate that governments still hold tremendous authority. What seems to be changing is not whether governments matter, but what they increasingly depend on. If the Industrial Revolution depended on railroads and oil, the artificial intelligence revolution depends on chips, compute, cloud infrastructure and the companies capable of building them.
SpaceX offers another example. Through Starlink, it has built one of the world’s largest satellite communications networks, providing internet access during natural disasters, remote emergencies and even active military conflicts. Once again, the value isn’t merely the product; it’s becoming indispensable. SpaceX is more than simply launching rockets, it is building infrastructure that governments, militaries, businesses and millions of civilians increasingly depend upon.
Last semester, I asked whether AI would replace workers. I no longer think that was the most important question to ask in this rising revolution. AI is certainly changing the workplace, but perhaps its greatest transformation lies elsewhere. It’s changing where investment flows, what governments prioritize, how companies compete and what the world now considers strategic. Chatbots may have captured our attention, but behind the screen a much larger story is unfolding — one about infrastructure, influence and the reshaping of power. Perhaps the biggest question is no longer what artificial intelligence can do, but about who the world will increasingly depend upon because of it.
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