The structural transitions that reorganise everything built on top of them — energy, compute, supply chains, financial rails. Where leverage compounds.
Some transitions stay contained within an industry. Others change the substrate everything else is built on, and the whole stack above reprices. This territory is about the second kind.
They are recognisable by their second-order effects. Energy production becomes the binding constraint on model training, so grid interconnection queues turn into an AI story. Settlement moves onto programmable rails, so treasury operations turn into a software category. Export controls make compute a sovereign asset, so supply chains turn into geopolitics. In each case the visible technology is downstream of a change in what is scarce.
Scarcity is the thing to follow. Leverage sits with whoever holds the constrained input while the rest of the system is still pricing the one that used to be constrained.
The post-Cold War consensus around rules-based free trade has wound down. What replaces it — and the three technology categories that sit at its critical seams.
Read →The Department of Commerce's joint study of the civil space industrial base — with NASA and NOAA — is a signal worth reading. The fact that the study is being conducted at all is more useful than any specific finding will be.
Read →The Inflation Reduction Act, the European energy crisis, and a year of climate extremes converge into a different investment case for climate technology — one that no longer needs the environmental argument to clear capital diligence.
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