Stratomere

When an aircraft breaks the sound barrier, it creates a shockwave – it moves faster than the surrounding air can propagate the disturbance. The medium cannot accommodate the perturbation, creating a discontinuity. A sonic boom.

Like ripples on the surface of a pond, the shockwave propagates outward, its effects dissipating with distance. Demand for AI services is propagating faster than the technology supply chain can absorb. First it was GPUs to train and run large language models. Now it is energy to power them, according to Microsoft’s CEO. These ripples reverberate in our everyday lives; electricity prices rise as datacenter demand strains grid capacity, and consumer electronics grow more expensive as they compete for the same constrained semiconductor supply.

Physical supply chains do not respond at the speed of software. Semiconductor fabs and power plants require billions of dollars in capital investment and years of construction, along with the human capital required to build and operate them. Even when demand is clear and capital is available, capacity cannot be expanded overnight. The medium resists sudden acceleration.

In a world where computation is constrained by physical and economic reality, software architecture increasingly becomes an expression of corporate strategy. It mediates customer demand against scarce, expensive resources, and in doing so determines what scales, what stalls, and what becomes uneconomical.