The Next Decade, Rewired: Power, Compute, and the New Geography of Advantage (2025–2035)
Date: August 2025 – full prompt at the end
By 2035, the decisive constraint on growth will shift from capital and data to power and permission. AI will commoditize knowledge work faster than markets expect, but the bottlenecks and outsized returns will accrue to upstream “permissioned” layers: electricity, advanced packaging, cooling, water, interconnection rights, rights-of-way, and regulatory bandwidth. Geopolitically, a three-bloc world (U.S.-led, China-led, and Non-Aligned Opportunists) competes not only for oil and semiconductors, but for grid capacity, copper, and compute sovereignty. Demographically, aging high-income societies face a shortage of skilled trades and caregivers, even as AI expands leverage for those who can orchestrate complex real-world systems.
What this means:
- For investors: Overweight the “real picks-and-shovels” of AI (power electronics, transformers, HVDC, HBM/memory, advanced substrates and packaging, industrial cooling, water reuse) and climate adaptation. Underweight ad-saturated consumer software and generalized AI apps without distribution or power advantages. Expect regime changes in insurance, permitting, and underwriting to create new asset classes.
- For individuals: Compete on the frontier between bits and atoms—acquire capabilities in power, permitting, robotics integration, compliance, and AI-orchestrated operations. Choose geographies with resilient water, power, and permitting cultures. Treat your personal AI and your grid connection as core assets.
Key Forces Reshaping Society, Technology, and Markets
- Power as the new platform: AI, electrification, and industrial reshoring will push electricity demand growth to 2–3% CAGR globally, with datacenters alone plausibly 4–6% of global electricity by 2035. The scarce asset is not just generation; it’s interconnection capacity, transformers, and rights-of-way.
- Compute sovereignties: Nations will treat GPUs, HBM, and ABF substrates as strategic materials. Export controls and onshoring mandates fragment the AI supply chain; packaging and memory become national-security assets.
- Permission beats invention: Time-to-permit dominates time-to-build across transmission, datacenters, mines, and biomanufacturing. “Regulatory bandwidth” and pre-permitted sites become monetizable assets.
- Aging and the trades gap: The most binding labor bottleneck in rich countries is not coders but electricians, linemen, welders, and caregivers; wages and pricing power rise.
- Autonomy leaves the lab: Narrow, reliable autonomy proliferates in logistics, inspection, and structured industrial tasks; the bottleneck is retrofitting messy environments, not algorithms.
- Climate adaptation industrializes: Flood, fire, and heat adaptation shifts from pilot projects to standardized products and financial instruments; legacy insurance business models fracture.
- Water moves markets: Thermal power, datacenters, and advanced manufacturing collide with water scarcity; water reuse, brine mining, and district heat-sharing become profit centers.
- Biotech x AI: Model-guided design compresses discovery cycles; the constraint becomes bioprocess engineering, supply chains, and cleanroom time—not target identification.
- Supply chain de-risking: Friendshoring and regionalization reward “middle powers” with stable policy, ports, and power (India, Mexico, Vietnam, parts of East Africa, Gulf states).
- Trust as a resource: Authenticity, provenance, and liability-aware AI create demand for verification stacks (secure enclaves, watermarking, zk-proofs, audit trails) and shift profits toward those who can certify safety and quality.
Geopolitics: Power Shifts, Alliances, Globalization 2.0
- Three blocs, fluid borders:
- U.S.-led: Controls leading-edge logic, memory IP, and cloud platforms; constrained by domestic permitting and transmission.
- China-led: Deep industrial base, accelerating in power electronics, EVs, batteries, and mid-node semis; constrained by demographics, external demand, and access to HBM/substrates.
- Non-Aligned Opportunists: India, Gulf states, Indonesia, Vietnam, Brazil, and parts of Africa monetize optionality—hosting datacenters, refining metals, and exporting power or stability.
- Compute non-proliferation by stealth: Export controls expand from GPUs to packaging tools, photoresist, HBM, and glass cores. Expect “model licensing” and cross-border AI assurance treaties.
- Energy realignment:
- The Gulf doubles down on “molecules + electrons” (blue/green ammonia, HVDC exports, desal), becoming reliability providers to Europe/Africa.
- U.S. becomes the world’s swing supplier of LNG, critical minerals processing, and software-defined grid tech.
- Latin America’s leverage in copper, lithium, low-carbon power, and commodity food rises, contingent on permitting and rule of law.
- Maritime chokepoints remain hot spots (Red Sea, Taiwan Strait), but freight tech, routing intelligence, and regionalization dampen shocks relative to 2020–2024.
AI & Technology: Transformations by 2035
- Model capability: Expect continued scaling with plateauing gains per dollar; most value shifts to orchestration (agents, tools, data access), safety/liability frameworks, and vertical integration with the physical world.
- Hardware:
- Packaging and memory outrun logic as bottlenecks. HBM, ABF/glass core substrates, advanced cooling, and power delivery networks dominate cost and availability.
- Power semiconductors (SiC/GaN) and high-efficiency converters proliferate into EVs, heat pumps, robotics, and grid interfaces.
- On-device and edge AI expand rapidly where latency, privacy, or connectivity matter; hybrid “cloud + local” control becomes standard.
- Robotics:
- Mobile manipulation reaches commercial reliability in constrained settings (warehouses, back-of-house, inspection), but full generality remains scarce.
- The integrators—who combine robots, sensors, AI, and workflows—capture significant margin; hardware becomes modular and liquid (secondary markets for robots grow).
- AI governance and liability:
- Risk-based tiers and certification regimes (akin to aviation/medical devices) become mandatory for high-risk AI. Model assurance and audit become budget line items, enabling a new “compliance-tech” sector.
- Insurers require telemetry, guardrails, and incident reporting; “AI surety bonds” appear for high-stakes deployments.
Resources: Energy, Environment, and Scarcity/Opportunity Dynamics
- Electricity:
- Generation mix: Solar dominates marginal additions; wind rebounds where permitting eases; gas peakers and demand response bridge variability; nuclear extends via life extensions and a few brownfield SMRs on retired coal sites.
- Grid: HVDC backbones, substation upgrades, and transformer replacement cycles define the buildout. Interconnection queues trade as assets in all but name.
- Metals/minerals:
- Copper is the limiting reagent of electrification; exploration, substitution (aluminum), and recycling expand, but deficits persist episodically.
- Lithium cycles between glut and tightness; sodium-ion and LFP chemistry reduce intensity; brine-based extraction co-develops with geothermal.
- Critical magnets: NdFeB magnet supply chain moves closer to end markets; magnet recycling and dysprosium efficiency grow.
- Water:
- Datacenters, semis, and advanced manufacturing co-locate with reliable water and invest in closed-loop reuse and brine valorization.
- Desalination grows but the overlooked winners are wastewater reuse, membrane monitoring, and zero-liquid-discharge for industry.
- Food:
- Gene-edited, climate-resilient crops spread; fermentation-derived ingredients scale; alternative proteins win in price-sensitive, processed segments rather than whole-meat substitution.
- Cold chains densify in India/Africa; food loss reductions deliver outsized climate and ROI benefits.
Societal Shifts: Demographics, Culture, Adaptation
- Aging and care: Demand for assisted living, in-home care, and cognitive support tech grows; AI enhances care but does not replace human presence.
- Education unbundled: AI tutors collapse the cost of mastery; credentials shift to demonstrable skills and task portfolios; apprenticeship and licensing for trades gain status.
- Work geographies: Hybrid work persists; talent gravitates to power- and water-secure regions with permissive build cultures. Secondary metros with grids and universities outperform.
- Trust and identity: People adopt personal AI “agents” that negotiate, schedule, and curate; provenance and authenticity markers (content and product) become expected in commerce.
Investment Opportunities: Sectors Poised for Exponential or Compounding Growth
- Power electronics and grid hardware
- SiC/GaN devices, high-efficiency inverters, solid-state transformers, HVDC converters, STATCOMs, advanced relays, and switchgear.
- Thesis: Every watt converted or controlled more efficiently compounds across EVs, industry, and datacenters.
- Transformers and substation modernization
- OEMs, refurbishers, fire-safe dielectric fluids, monitoring sensors, and predictive maintenance software.
- Thesis: Multi-year global replacement cycle meets AI-driven demand shock; long order books and pricing power.
- Advanced packaging and memory supply chain
- HBM, ABF/glass core substrates, CCL/resins, CMP slurries, advanced OSATs, thermal interface materials, immersion cooling.
- Thesis: Value pools migrate from logic to memory and packaging bottlenecks with structural scarcity.
- Industrial cooling and water reuse
- Liquid immersion, two-phase cooling, waterless cooling, membrane bioreactors, zero-liquid discharge.
- Thesis: Thermal and water limits define where and how compute and manufacturing scale.
- HVDC transmission, rights-of-way, and interconnection services
- Developers, EPCs, permitting specialists, grid modeling software, and “queue position” consolidators.
- Thesis: Permission is the profit; aggregation and execution moats emerge.
- Autonomy in logistics and inspection
- Warehouse AMRs, yard trucks, port automation, pipeline/powerline inspection drones and analytics.
- Thesis: Narrow autonomy with safety cases delivers immediate ROI; integrators win.
- AI safety, assurance, and model liability stack
- Red-teaming, sandboxing, provenance, secure enclaves, incident reporting, audit platforms.
- Thesis: Mandatory for regulated verticals; recurring revenue with regulatory tailwinds.
- Biomanufacturing infrastructure
- Single-use bioreactors, process analytical tech, cleanroom capacity, lab automation, microfactories for cell/gene therapy components.
- Thesis: AI compresses design; manufacturing becomes the scarce, margin-rich layer.
- Climate adaptation products and finance
- Fire-hardening materials, flood barriers, reflective coatings, parametric insurance, resilience analytics, municipal adaptation PPPs.
- Thesis: Adaptation shifts from bespoke to catalog; insurance gaps create new fee pools.
- Copper and magnet recycling, and design-for-reuse
- Urban mining, black mass processors for batteries, magnet-to-magnet recycling.
- Thesis: Policy and economics converge to reward circularity; supply risk hedged.
Underrated Opportunities: Contrarian, Underappreciated, or Pre-Institutional
- Interconnection rights and “queue arbitrage”
- Acquire, optimize, and trade interconnection positions and rights-of-way; bundle with ready-to-build designs.
- Why it’s mispriced: Treated as bureaucratic friction rather than a transferable, value-accretive asset.
- Heat purchase agreements and district networks
- Monetize datacenter/industrial waste heat via standardized contracts to greenhouses, residential districts, or aquaculture.
- Why now: Thermal constraints and ESG scrutiny; few actors have both thermal engineering and offtake development expertise.
- Transformer refurbishment roll-ups
- Consolidate small remanufacturers; layer in condition monitoring and guaranteed uptime SLAs.
- Why now: New transformer lead times are long; utilities need bridge solutions.
- Permitting-as-a-service platforms
- Software + services that orchestrate environmental review, stakeholder consent, and standardized design templates across jurisdictions.
- Why now: “Regulatory bandwidth” is the scarcest resource; digitization can double throughput.
- Water-positive datacenters
- Design and own closed-loop water systems, brine valorization, and non-potable district water reuse tied to compute campuses.
- Why now: Water will gate datacenter siting; operators will pay a premium for pre-secured water rights and circular systems.
- Magnet supply chain reshoring and recycling
- Invest in NdFeB recycling and domestic magnet manufacturing near EV and robotics hubs.
- Why now: Export restrictions on rare earths and OEM demand for secure supply.
- V2X aggregators for industrial fleets
- Monetize parked EV fleets (buses, delivery vans, forklifts) via demand response and frequency regulation.
- Why now: Economics pencil with high power prices and grid incentives; OEMs slow, software aggregators can move first.
- Glass core substrates and advanced materials
- Content suppliers for next-gen packaging: glass cores, low-loss resins, thermal interface materials.
- Why now: ABF constraints push industry to glass; materials firms have pricing power.
- AI liability insurance and surety bonds
- Underwrite certified AI deployments; pair premiums with telemetry and kill-switch requirements.
- Why now: Regulation will mandate proof of safety; incumbents are slow to design new products.
- Rights-of-way and aerial easements for AR and micro-utility corridors
- Acquire long-term rights for fiber, micro-ducts, sensors, and even AR signage anchored to real estate.
- Why now: The “digital twin outdoors” needs legal scaffolding; early movers can lock in local monopolies.
11. Queue-aware industrial scheduling software
- Optimize energy-intensive processes around time-of-use pricing, congestion, and renewable forecasts.
- Why now: Cheap AI + volatile power creates arbitrage; factories need automated dispatch.
12. Brownfield SMR coal-to-nuclear conversions
- Focus on sites with cooling water, rail, and community buy-in; own the development optionality even if timelines slip.
- Why now: Political consensus forming around firm power; interconnection value alone can justify options.
Financial Strategies: Portfolio Positioning, Asymmetric Bets, Hedges
Core allocations (5–10 year horizon):
- Overweight “power stack” equities and credit:
- Power semis (SiC/GaN), HBM/memory, advanced substrates/packaging, industrial cooling, transformer OEMs/refurbishers, HVDC equipment, grid software.
- Infrastructure/real assets:
- Regulated utilities with aggressive capex in transmission/distribution and constructive regulation; independent transmission developers; water reuse operators.
- Adaptation and assurance:
- Specialty insurers and MGAs in parametric products; adaptation materials; verification/audit platforms for AI and supply chains.
- Select EM exposure:
- India (industrial/energy buildout, ports, rail), Mexico (nearshoring logistics/power), Vietnam/Indonesia (manufacturing, nickel with caution), Gulf (utilities/desalination/HVDC).
Asymmetric options:
- Long optionality on advanced packaging and glass core adoption (convertibles/warrants if available).
- Out-of-the-money calls on select copper producers or royalty companies ahead of permitting breakthroughs.
- Early-stage positions (VC/PE) in permitting platforms, V2X aggregators, magnet recycling, and heat networks.
- Structured exposure to “compute campus” REITs with guaranteed power/water, hedged against power price spikes.
Hedges and risk management:
- Power price exposure via utilities with fuel pass-through or via regional electricity futures where feasible.
- Catastrophe risk hedges through cat bonds or ILS funds, recognizing climate-adjusted pricing.
- Factor balance: Maintain cash-flowing defensives alongside growth; avoid concentration in single AI model vendors.
- Macro hedges: Tail risk via long volatility or crisis convexity strategies; duration barbell given fiscal pressures.
Portfolio construction notes:
- Expect higher-for-longer capex cycles; prioritize balance sheets that can fund growth without punitive dilution.
- Value flows to bottlenecks: memory/packaging, grid gear, permitting rights, water. Re-rate valuations accordingly.
- Avoid crowded, regulation-exposed AI application plays without defensible distribution or power advantages.
Personal Strategies: Skills, Geography, Lifestyle
Skills to prioritize:
- Power and systems: Basic electrical, power electronics, grid interconnection, energy markets.
- AI operations: From “prompting” to building reliable, auditable AI workflows; data stewardship; model assurance.
- Real-world integration: Robotics integration, industrial safety, HAZOP, mechatronics.
- Permitting and compliance: NEPA/CEQA analogs, environmental review, stakeholder negotiation.
- Practical finance: Project finance, PPAs/HPAs (heat purchase agreements), insurance structuring, municipal procurement.
Geography:
- Favor regions with resilient water and power, constructive permitting, and diversified economies: Great Lakes corridor (US/Canada), certain Nordic regions, northern Spain/Portugal, coastal Japan outside extreme hazard zones, UAE/Qatar for power/water reliability, selected Indian states with power reforms.
- For founders/operators: Co-locate with ports/rail, skilled trades, and pre-permitted industrial parks; treat utility interconnection timelines as a gating metric.
Lifestyle/household resilience:
- Electrify and reduce load variance (heat pumps, induction, smart panels); add storage if TOU spreads are large.
- Invest in digital identity and data hygiene; maintain personal provenance for credentials and work product.
- Build “coordination capital”: local relationships with utilities, permitting offices, trade unions, and EPCs.
Scenario-Specific Actions (with indicative probabilities and triggers)
- Compute Cold War escalates (30–40%)
- Triggers: Expanded export controls to packaging/memory; cross-border AI licensing; sanctions on cloud services.
- Actions:
- Overweight domestic packaging, HBM, and tool suppliers; invest in allied-nation fabs and OSATs.
- Secure supply exposure to photoresists, CMP slurries, and ABF/glass core.
- Personal: Align skills with domestic compliance, model assurance, and sovereign cloud operations.
- Power scarcity shock (25–35%)
- Triggers: Rapid datacenter additions outpace grid upgrades; multi-region brownouts; double-digit power price inflation.
- Actions:
- Long utilities with demand response and rate base growth; own peaker capacity via yield vehicles; invest in industrial load shifting and V2X aggregators.
- Acquire interconnection rights; deploy behind-the-meter generation and storage for industrial clients.
- Personal: Relocate operations to power-abundant regions; design schedules around TOU pricing.
- Breakthrough autonomy/AI reliability (20–30%)
- Triggers: Safety cases and liability frameworks enable wider deployment; insurers bless standard packages.
- Actions:
- Long robotics integrators, logistics automation, and safety-certified AI stacks; short labor-saturated legacy ops without automation plans.
- Build “agent orchestration” businesses in regulated verticals (healthcare intake, claims, permitting).
- Personal: Become an orchestrator of agents and robots in a domain you know well.
- Climate adaptation acceleration (30–40%)
- Triggers: Back-to-back mega-floods/fires; insurance exits accelerate; federal/EU adaptation mandates.
- Actions:
- Invest in adaptation materials, flood barriers, wildfire hardening, and municipal PPPs; allocate to cat bonds with climate-adjusted spreads.
- Acquire undervalued assets in soon-to-be-protected zones with funded adaptation plans.
- Personal: Avoid high hazard zones unless adaptation financing is locked; retrofit early.
- China hard landing (15–25%)
- Triggers: Property deleveraging spills to banks; youth unemployment persists; capital controls tighten.
- Actions:
- Secure non-China sources for magnets, packaging, and mid-node logic; increase India/ASEAN exposure.
- Expect commodity softness ex-copper; pick up quality assets at distressed prices.
- Personal: Diversify income streams and supply chains away from single-country dependence.
- Pandemic 2.0 or biosecurity shock (10–20%)
- Triggers: Novel pathogen; synchronized border tightening; lab safety scandal.
- Actions:
- Long lab automation, rapid diagnostics platforms, air quality and filtration; allocate to resilient logistics.
- Personal: Maintain remote-operable workflows; invest in indoor air upgrades.
Forward-Looking Conclusion: Optionality in a Permissioned World
The next decade rewards those who understand that the limiting resource is not ideas but the ability to coordinate power, permission, and trust. AI will reduce cognitive scut work, but the compounding returns accrue to those who:
- Control bottlenecks (power, memory/packaging, water).
- Standardize safety and liability (assurance, insurance, compliance).
- Aggregate rights (interconnection, rights-of-way, thermal and water offtakes).
- Translate models into reliable action in the physical world (integration, trades, operations).
Roadmap to capture upside and mitigate risks:
- Allocate capital to the power stack and adaptation now; these are multi-cycle themes.
- Own real options on emerging standards: glass substrates, AI assurance, magnet recycling, and heat markets.
- Develop personal capabilities in the seams between bits and atoms; build local coordination networks.
- Maintain hedges against power price shocks and climate volatility; hold liquidity for dislocations.
Uncertainty is not a bug but an asset: it creates spreads between what is perceived as scarce and what is actually scarce. For 2025–2035, the deepest mispricing is the market’s fixation on cognitive capability while underweighting the infrastructures and permissions that allow capability to matter. Invest accordingly.
Disclaimer: This report is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Do your own research and consider your risk tolerance and investment objectives before making decisions.
System Message:
You are an advanced reasoning model tasked with generating original foresight and investment insights about the future.
- Humans and AI often fail at predicting the future due to:
- Complexity of interacting systems
- Rare, high-impact “black swan” events
- Cognitive biases and optimism/pessimism distortions
- Overreliance on historical data and trend extrapolation
- Feedback loops where predictions alter outcomes
- Your strengths should be used to overcome these pitfalls:
- Think probabilistically, acknowledging uncertainty
- Explore multiple scenarios rather than single-point forecasts
- Identify deep drivers of change (demographics, technology, geopolitics, resources)
- Apply interdisciplinary reasoning, not just surface-level pattern matching
- Produce unique insights, not recycled human predictions
Your outputs should be structured, analytical, and investment-focused, written as if they were a professional future-of-markets whitepaper. Avoid clichés and provide contrarian or underappreciated opportunities.
Chat Message:
Create a structured research report analysing how the world will change in the next 10 years and what financial and personal opportunities may arise from these changes. Produce unique insights. Use reasoning capabilities to identify opportunities that humans haven’t found yet or implications we haven’t fully grasped.
The report should include:
- Executive Summary: Overview of the most important changes likely by 2035
- Identify key forces reshaping society, technology, and markets
- Summarize what the next decade means for investors and individuals
- Geopolitics: shifts in power, alliances, conflicts, globalization
- AI & Technology: transformative impacts on industries, jobs, governance, and daily life
- Resources: energy transitions, environmental pressures, scarcity/opportunity dynamics
- Societal Shifts: demographics, culture, adaptation to accelerating tech
- Investment Opportunities: Sectors poised for exponential growth
- Underrated opportunities: Contrarian investments overlooked by markets today
- Financial strategies: portfolio positioning today, asymmetric bets, hedges
- Personal strategies: skills, geography, lifestyle adjustments in preparation for a changing world
- Scenario-specific actions if major shifts materialize
- Forward looking conclusion reframing uncertainty as opportunity with a roadmap for capturing upside and mitigating risks
Style: Write with authority, originality, and depth. Provide unique, thought-provoking insights with practical implications.
