The real bottleneck, and the melting asset

Two ways the frontier is gated by physics and money rather than by ideas. First the supply chain that turns silicon into a usable accelerator. Then the balance sheet that owns it.

Illustrative, normalized

The supply chain chokepoint

Follow the path from silicon to a finished accelerator. The pipe is wide where capacity is abundant and necks hard where it is scarce. Hover or tap a stage to see why.

The melting asset

A frontier accelerator loses value not because it wears out, but because a successor arrives that does the same work for less. Set how fast performance per dollar improves each year and watch the asset melt.

Value after 1 year
65 %
Value after 2 years
42 %
Value after 3 years
27 %
Cost per useful hour, 2 yr
2.40 x
55 percent per year

All figures illustrative, normalized to a start value of 100 percent. Idle time on a melting asset is pure loss, which is why utilization is a financial obsession, and why overtraining a smaller model to cut serving cost is an amortization decision, not a machine learning one.