We offer a genealogy of recent artificial intelligence infrastructure investment, situating it within a longer-term strategy by Big Cloud firms to construct and dominate the cloud computing market. Based on an analysis of 12 years of financial data and earnings calls from Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, we introduce the concept of “cloud assets” to help elucidate their dominance. Neither strictly tangible nor intangible, this is a new hybrid asset form wherein digital infrastructure gets configured through accounting practices and market devices to generate what we call the “unit of compute.” Our constructivist perspective seeks to avoid the binary framing within current debates on whether Big Cloud's dominance derives from their control of physical infrastructure, or of data and platforms. Instead, we trace the techno-economic procedures that define and quantify the temporality of access, pricing structures, and processor types that generate revenue streams from endlessly resellable “units of compute.” We describe a “digital Jevons effect” which further consolidates control over compute, with implications for the future of algorithmic innovation and regulation.
Hellman et al. (Tue,) studied this question.