The infrastructure squeeze is tightening into a capital war, while the software layer fractures into paid tiers and feature-gated products that users are already questioning. SoftBank's €75 billion commitment to French data centers signals that compute capacity itself has become the strategic asset, Masayoshi Son is betting that whoever controls the substrate controls the market. Meanwhile, the software stack is inverting. Github Copilot's shift to token-based billing is sparking backlash because developers suddenly see the unit economics of what was once a loss leader, and the margin has become visible and resented. Google's decision to splinter Gemini into a separate product called Spark suggests the company is testing whether users will pay for AI assistants once they're unbundled from search, a question that remains unanswered. The transcription software market is already showing price resistance, free services are adequate enough that paid alternatives struggle to justify their cost. Meta is betting on hardware form factors to escape the browser and search incumbency, while Iran's military is simply taking the models that exist and using them for offensive operations, revealing that control over AI's output matters far less than control over its inputs and the data that train it. The real leverage sits with whoever owns the electricity, the silicon, and the training data. Everything else is software, and software is becoming a commodified layer that users increasingly resent paying for.
Sloane Duvall