I used to think return on investment was the cleanest concept in finance. You put money in. You get more money out. You measure the difference. You pretend it was obvious the whole time. Then I started looking at AI companies—and suddenly ROI felt like trying to measure fog with a ruler. Because in the AI world, the real question isn’t just “what’s the return?” It’s: what’s the return on compute? And that’s where things get messy, expensive, and just a little bit absurd. The New Arms Race Nobody Fully Understands There’s a quiet competition happening right now, and it doesn’t look like anything we’ve seen before. It’s not just about revenue growth. It’s not even about user growth. It’s about compute. Who has it. Who can afford it. Who can turn it into something that actually makes money before the electricity bill shows up like an uninvited guest. Because AI isn’t like traditional software. You don’t just write code and scale it infinitely with minimal cost. Every model, e...
I used to think I understood the market. Not in a “CFA charterholder with twelve monitors and a Bloomberg terminal humming like a nuclear reactor” kind of way. More like the average overconfident adult who has survived a few bull runs, memorized a couple of ratios, and once said the phrase “forward-looking multiples” at a barbecue without being asked to leave. I thought I got it. Leadership rotates. Cycles cycle. Money flows like water—from one hot sector to the next, from growth to value, from “this is the future” to “this is somehow still alive.” It was comforting. Predictable, even. Tech leads. Then it cools. Industrials step in. Energy has its midlife crisis moment. Financials pretend they’re exciting again. Then back to tech, because of course. It was like watching a group of overpaid relay runners pass a baton labeled “market dominance,” each pretending they weren’t completely exhausted when they got it. Then AI showed up. And instead of a relay race, the baton got replaced with ...