That was the case with oil. As a primary resource that enabled energy production, oil defined the 20th century.
In the late 19th century, it was just something to light lamps with. But over time, it came to determine the fate of nations.
Now, something similar is happening with computational power. What used to be an abstract resource—processing capability—has taken a concrete form: the GPU.
And GPUs have become commodities in the market.
To run generative AI, you need GPUs.
And not just any GPU—you need ones with high memory bandwidth and massive parallelism. As of early 2025, these are essential. In the world of generative AI, GPUs are infrastructure. They are resources. They are currency. And uniquely, they are a currency that even post-human intelligences can value and transact with.
As the generative AI market expands and takes up a larger share of the global economy, the question becomes:
Who holds the GPUs? That shapes the distribution of economic zones, control over protocols, and even the visibility and influence over how societies are governed.
What’s interesting is that, much like oil, the value of GPUs doesn’t come from ownership alone. You still need electricity to run them. You need proper cooling to raise density. And without the right software, even the best hardware is useless.
So in this era, it’s not just about possessing resources—it’s about having the structure to use them. Just as oil created geopolitical tensions between producers and consumers, GPUs are now woven into the fabric of geography and power.
For those of us living through this shift, the key question isn’t simply “Where are the GPUs?”
It’s “How do we embed GPUs into society?”
How do we distribute them into cities, into regional industries, into educational institutions? How do we make AI infrastructure usable at the local level, not just locked inside distant clouds?
That’s the challenge of this era—and it’s already begun.
One last thought. GPUs, or more specifically GPGPUs, are merely the current form of primary resource. Just as oil was a stepping stone to electricity, GPUs are a stepping stone to the next wave of computational resources.
As long as what we ultimately seek is computational power, other types of semiconductors will inevitably emerge and grow. Sustainability will be key, here as well.