Remember when your biggest career worry was whether robots would steal factory jobs? Well, plot twist: they’re coming for the corner office too.
We’re witnessing what economists are calling the “Great Decoupling” – basically, the moment when corporate profits and human paychecks decided to see other people. Corporate profits are hitting record highs at 11.55% of GDP while workers’ share has plummeted to 53.8%, the lowest since the 1940s. Translation: the money’s still flowing, it’s just not flowing to you.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth nobody wants to talk about: AI isn’t just making us “more efficient.” That’s corporate speak for “we used to need five of you, now we need one.” When ChatGPT can write legal briefs and Claude can debug code, suddenly that expensive law degree or computer science diploma starts looking like a very expensive piece of paper.
Take Chegg, the homework help company that was basically printing money until ChatGPT showed up. Students realized they could get better answers for free, and Chegg’s stock cratered 90%. Ouch. Even giants like Salesforce are sweating – why pay for 1,000 software licenses when one AI agent can do the work of 1,000 employees?
But here’s where it gets interesting (and profitable). While everyone’s panicking about job displacement, smart money is quietly positioning itself on the other side of this equation. The wealth isn’t disappearing – it’s just moving from paychecks to power grids.
See, AI has a dirty little secret: it’s incredibly energy-hungry. A single query on OpenAI’s reasoning model uses 10 times more electricity than a Google search. Goldman Sachs predicts AI will drive a 160% surge in data center power demand by 2030. We’re not just building computers anymore – we’re building “information power plants.”
This is why the really smart money (think sovereign wealth funds and billionaire hedge fund managers) is buying up energy assets like they’re going out of style. Natural gas, power infrastructure, cooling systems – anything that keeps the AI machines humming.
The government gets it too. Instead of trying to slow down AI to save jobs, they’re hitting the accelerator. Project Stargate ($100 billion for supercomputers) and the Genesis Mission (basically a Manhattan Project for AI) aren’t about protecting workers – they’re about making sure America owns the most powerful “replacement engine” on the planet.
So what’s an investor to do? Stop betting on human expertise and start betting on the infrastructure that’s replacing it. Think natural gas companies, data center operators, and advanced computing hardware manufacturers. The companies building the pipes, not the ones getting disrupted by what flows through them.
Look, I’m not saying this transition will be painless. But fighting it is like trying to stop the internet in 1995. The question isn’t whether AI will reshape the economy – it’s whether you’ll be on the winning side when it does.
The age of human labor is ending. The age of owning the machines that replace human labor? That’s just getting started.