In the past, the foundation of the economy was gold.
Under the gold standard, currency was backed by physical assets.
The rarity of gold itself directly reflected the credibility of a nation and the value of its currency. That was the world we once lived in.
After a long phase of economic expansion unmoored from tangible assets, we are now entering a world where computational capacity is beginning to take the place once held by gold.
AI has become the foundation of all economic activity.
Industries are run by models. Decisions are made by computation.
In such a society, value is no longer created by labor—but by computational resources themselves.
And what are computational resources?
They are, in the physical sense, electricity, compute devices, cooling infrastructure, access as a matter of policy, and above all, semiconductors.
In the coming world, a nation’s credibility will be determined by how much it can compute.
National power will increasingly reflect the total computational capacity it controls.
A country that possesses semiconductor design and fabrication capabilities—and the energy and infrastructure to operate them—will be able to anchor its currency with computational resources.
This represents a transition into a compute-backed economic system.
Where once nations signaled their monetary credibility with gold reserves, they may soon point to the total number of GPGPUs they own, the strength of their AI training infrastructure, or the volume of high-quality data they control.
We may enter a world where it is reasonable to say, “Our currency is stable because we possess sufficient compute.”
It’s possible that compute has already rewritten the very concept of military power.
Computational resources are invisible. And their value is fluid.
Electricity prices, cooling efficiency, software optimization, algorithmic efficiency, and data quality—all of these dynamically affect the credibility of a currency.
This is a real-time economic foundation, so dynamic that humans alone may be unable to grasp it.
It presupposes communication between AIs.
And for any nation without computational resources to participate in that communication, the end may already be near.
Until now, the economy has been driven by “intangible trust.”
But in the age of AI, it is “the total executable compute” that becomes the final form of trust.
And at the core of that trust lies the hard fact of how much compute a nation possesses—and governs—within its borders.
Semiconductors, electricity, and data are no longer merely parts of industrial structure.
They underpin currency and sovereignty.
And the nation that supports them will be the one that holds the next global reserve currency.