Mark Zuckerberg told shareholders in May that renting out Meta’s surplus computing power is “definitely on the table.” The remark was casual. The implications are not. Meta has guided capital expenditure of up to $145 billion for 2026 alone — roughly double what it spent in 2025 — on chips, land, and electricity to feed artificial intelligence. If its own products cannot absorb that capacity, the company will simply become a landlord, leasing digital acreage to tenants who have nowhere else to plough.

That single sentence crystallises a structural transformation that Yanis Varoufakis has labelled “technofeudalism”: the proposition that platform owners no longer earn profit in the classical sense but extract rent, much as feudal lords extracted it from peasants tilling soil they could never own. The argument is provocative, deliberately so, and more illuminating than many of his critics allow. Varoufakis deserves credit for forcing the question that polite economics prefers to avoid: whether the platform economy still operates by the rules we teach in textbooks, or whether something structurally different is at work. His answer — that rent has displaced profit as the organising principle — correctly identifies the symptom. Where he overreaches is in declaring the patient dead. Conventional financial economics already supplies the diagnostic toolkit; the disease is a mutation, not a succession.

Consider the logic through real options theory. When Meta spends $145 billion on data centre infrastructure, it is not purchasing fixed output. It is purchasing optionality:........

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