The artificial intelligence boom has fully entered the infrastructure construction phase, triggering one of the largest waves of corporate investment in recent years. As the chart shows, capital expenditure growth has outpaced free cash flow growth as large hyperscale cloud service providers aggressively invest in chips and data centers. However, the telecommunications boom of the late 1990s offers a valuable lesson: investment expands capacity, and this expansion can transfer scarcity and economic rents to other areas of the ecosystem. Understanding potential new constraints in the future may be just as important as identifying the beneficiaries of the current cycle.
