Compute per joule
Feedstock, lithography consumables, thermal materials, and the firms that make them — what decides how much computation a watt can buy.
Does this make a thought cheaper to have?
Mandate
On a curve, and a chokepoint. Fail either test and it does not enter coverage.
We decline business and coverage every week. Not because either is unprofitable, but because a universe that drifts into general commodities and general tech loses the only edge a specialist has: knowing, for a countable number of nodes, every qualified producer, every grade that actually ships, and every lead time that is real rather than quoted.
Three curves
Joules delivered
Transformer steel, conductors, superconducting tape, the cryogens that keep them cold, and the interconnect queue. A datacentre that cannot be energised is a shed.
Does this get power to where the compute is?
Actuation
Permanent-magnet feed, precision drives, additive manufacturing — the step where a model stops advising and starts doing physical work.
Does this give intelligence hands?
The chokepoint screen
Being on a curve is not enough. Most of a supply chain is substitutable, and therefore uninteresting. A node earns coverage when it gates a curve.
- How few suppliers actually qualify?
- Qualified is not the same as capable — a producer nobody has certified is not supply.
- What happens if it disappears — a workaround, or a stop?
- A material with a drop-in replacement is a price story, not a chokepoint.
- How long from order to delivery, and from decision to new capacity?
- Large power transformers gate more datacentres today than chip supply does.
- Can the buyer walk away at any price?
- If the machine does not exist without it, the demand curve is a wall.
What counts as a node
The unit of coverage is a chokepoint, not an asset class. This is how the universe reaches robotics, AI hardware and additive manufacturing without becoming “everything”: you arrive at them by tracing a chain you were already mapping.
Material
A substance with a grade, a purity and a producer.
Company
Public or private. Most of the interesting ones are private.
Person
Where the process knowledge actually lives.
Machine
Tools with single-digit annual output and multi-year queues.
Process
Know-how that does not transfer with a purchase order.
Sequence
Research first, because it costs nothing but attention and it is the sourcing work the desk needs anyway.
- Phase 1 — the producers of the fifteen — active
- Map every qualified producer of the fifteen materials under coverage. Mostly private, mostly uncovered: the sell side writes about chip designers, not about who fires crucible-grade quartz.
- Phase 2 — the chokepoints that are not materials — active
- A material is only one kind of chokepoint. A tool with one supplier, packaging capacity allocated years ahead, a transformer order book, an interconnection queue and a process that lives in people rather than equipment all gate the same curves. These enter coverage on the same two tests, and the universe has already started admitting them.
- Phase 3 — one hop out
- From each node, one hop upstream and one downstream. This is where robotics, AI hardware and additive manufacturing enter on their own — as counterparties in a chain already being mapped, not as a new vertical.
- Later — a desk, if and when it is licensed
- Acting on the map rather than only publishing it means a regulated book: licensing, compliance, capital and counterparty onboarding, none of it quick. It is an intention, not a service, and nothing on this site should be read as an offer to trade.