Oil. Natural gas. Rare earths. Each one followed the same trajectory. Physical scarcity first. Then commodity pricing. Then futures markets. Then institutional allocation at scale. The cycle compressed each time. What took oil a century, gas did in 40 years. Rare earths in 20.

Compute is on the same path. We are, right now, at the inflection point between commodity and futures. The window to build the infrastructure layer for that transition is open. It will not stay open for long.

The demand signal has been visible for anyone paying attention.

That is not a software company scaling on zero marginal cost. That is a physical resource becoming industrial. The same revenue trajectory appeared in oil in the early 1970s, in rare earths in the early 2000s. The pattern is the same. The compression is faster.

The four largest hyperscalers spent a combined ~$410 billion on capital expenditures in 2025. 2026 guidance has now surged to $700-725 billion (Microsoft ~$190B, Amazon $200B, Alphabet $175-185B, Meta $125-145B). Goldman Sachs now models $765 billion in annual AI CapEx in 2026, scaling to $1.6 trillion annually by 2031 (cumulative ~$7.6 trillion from 2026-2031).

In 2023, the lead time for a single NVIDIA H100 GPU was 8 to 11 months. Spot prices reached $40,000 per unit against a list price of $30,000. Supply rationing. Premium pricing. Queue jumping. This is exactly what oil looked like in the early 1970s.

As recently as May 5, 2026, Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, managing $13.89 trillion in assets, stated publicly that surging demand for computing power could create an entirely new asset class centered around compute futures - specifically that "a new asset class will be buying futures of compute," citing shortages in power, chips, and compute capacity.

Fink has form here. He was early on bond ETFs. He was early on ESG as a capital allocation framework. When he speaks publicly about an emerging asset class, he is describing a product pipeline, not an opinion.

The oil futures market took 10 years to form after the 1973 OPEC supply shock. NYMEX crude oil futures launched in 1983. That market now trades $1.5 to $2........

© The Nation