Private Room

The digest had not mentioned the meal beyond the warning. No future line told him which sentence mattered. He had only the old tools: attention, resentment, pattern recognition. "AI infrastructure is becoming national infrastructure," Marcus said over fish Ethan could not identify. "The companies that control inference capacity will shape what everyone else can build." "That is why operators should control it," Priya said. "Not financiers." "Operators always say that until they need financing." "Financiers always say that until they need operators to make their spreadsheets less fictional." Marcus smiled. "Excellent." Then he turned to Ethan. "And you? What do you think the bottleneck is?"