AI Labs Are Oil Refineries: Crucible Capital on Compute as a New Asset Class
AccBalanced · x · 2026-11-06
On The Slow Hunch podcast, Crucible Capital founder Meltem Demirors argues that companies building superintelligence have the business model of an oil refinery: GPUs turn energy into compute, labs turn compute into tokens, and new financial markets will form around these commodities. Key takes: the whole compute value chain rests on crucibles (and a town in North Carolina); abundance is built on unpopular infrastructure; the credit pullback is a repricing, not a collapse; execution is the moat; agents will give everyone a quant trading desk; and markets are the most effective mechanism to distribute AI's economic value. Topics span the AI infra boom, the coming neo-cloud shakeout, and compute as an asset class.
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