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- 🔆 The Invisible Empire: Who Owns AI’s Physical Future?
🔆 The Invisible Empire: Who Owns AI’s Physical Future?
Understanding AI infrastructure signals, landmark amendments, and ethical data studies.
Allegra Guinan & Emma G Moller
July 17, 2025
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🗞️ Issue 79 // ⏱️ Read Time: 6 min
In this week's newsletter
What we’re talking about: The physical infrastructure that powers AI and why understanding who controls it matters more than the specs they advertise.
How it’s relevant: When you hear "NVIDIA launches new chip" or "Microsoft builds $80 billion data centers," these aren't just tech announcements. They're strategic moves that will determine an organisation’s AI options, costs, and competitive advantages for years to come.
Why it matters: The companies that win the infrastructure “battle” get to set the rules. They decide which AI capabilities you can access as a company, how much you'll pay, and whether you'll have genuine choices or be locked into their ecosystem. Understanding this landscape helps you make smarter bets about where to invest your AI strategy.
Hello 👋
Today, we’re getting physical. That is to say, we’ll be discussing the physical hardware that powers AI and the business around it. If you read our insights from Paris last week, you'll know that we attended a conference where some of the biggest players in AI infrastructure were on stage, talking about the current state and future of AI.
Most coverage misses that this isn't really about the technology. It's about power, control, and who gets to shape the future of business.
We're approaching this from a business strategy perspective, not a technical deep dive. Think "what this means for my AI roadmap" rather than "how the chips work." By the end of this newsletter, you'll know which infrastructure announcements actually affect your AI strategy and which are just noise.
Let's decode what's really happening.