Rent concentration in compute

Almost all AI regulation points at the models. Power, however, sits upstream, in a physical funnel that can be counted. Epoch AI measured it: TSMC is the sole producer of advanced CoWoS packaging for leading-edge chips, and four designers —Nvidia, AMD, Google, Amazon— were consuming 80-85% of total supply at the end of 2025; HBM memory has three suppliers in the world, all three sold out through 2026, and Nvidia’s share of its global consumption went from ~45% to more than 75% between 2024 and 2025 ^[375]AI Chip Supply Chain Bottlenecks and Capacity (AI Chip Components Explorer)Somala, Venkat · 2026 · reportView source ↗Accessed on 9 September 2026.

Capital follows the same shape: private AI investment grew 127.5% in 2025 and is already 60% of the total, and the United States committed 23 times more than China ^[34]The AI Index 2026 Annual Report — Chapter 4: EconomyStanford Institute for Human-Centered AI · 2026 · reportView source ↗Accessed on 9 September 2026. And so does adoption: more than 50% of the working-age population uses AI in the Emirates and Singapore against less than 10% in many low-income economies ^[538]International AI Safety Report 2026Bengio, Yoshua · 2026 · reportView source ↗Accessed on 9 September 2026 ^[71]Anthropic Economic Index report: Uneven geographic and enterprise AI adoptionAppel, Ruth; McCrory, Peter; Tamkin, Alex et al. · 2025 · reportView source ↗Accessed on 9 September 2026.

What this does not demonstrate. That the input is concentrated does not prove that the rents concentrate: that step is projection. The most cited forecast in that direction comes from a skeptic of large macro effects —Acemoglu estimates no more than a 0.66% increase in total factor productivity over ten years and still predicts that the capital-labour gap will widen— and it is a model, not a measurement ^[15]The Simple Macroeconomics of AIAcemoglu, Daron · 2025 · paperView source ↗Accessed on 9 September 2026. On the other side, labour’s share of US GDP has been stable at around 60% for more than a century, and that is the regularity one would have to see break. The funnel, moreover, cuts both ways: in June 2026 it was the state that used it, suspending worldwide access to two frontier modelsFrontier AIThe most advanced AI systems in existence at a given time, the ones pushing the limit of what the technology can do. A handful of companies with enormous resources build them.For exampleLike Formula 1 cars: there are few of them, they are extremely expensive and only a few teams build them, but what gets tested there ends up in everyone's car. for eighteen days ^[85]Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5Anthropic · 2026 · institutional blogView source ↗Accessed on 9 September 2026.