The global race for artificial intelligence is undergoing a geopolitical restructuring, driven by supply-side controls on compute power. Tech leaders are outlining new economic dynamics where compute capacity is the primary commodity.

A quiet but consequential shift is reshaping the global artificial intelligence competition, and it has little to do with which country builds the most powerful model. Jensen Huang did not mean to describe a geopolitical strategy. But when Nvidia’s chief executive declared, “Your workload is inference, your tokens are your commodity, and that compute is your revenue,” he was articulating, from the supply side, something China had concluded from the other direction. To understand why, start with....