📈  Chart of the Week 1/4/2026

By Michael Allison, CFA

Big Things Happen When a Word Changes Its Class

Googol: the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros.

While doing a search for available domain names, the founders of Google originally misspelled the name of their new company. They found the incorrect spelling to be more visually appealing and the name Google stuck.

What they built changed the internet and the advertising business forever… and changed the word “google” (googol) from a noun to a verb.

This week’s Chart shows the accelerating pace of change across a variety of growth cycles in computing power. Each cycle exhibited exponentially faster growth.

We stand today in the midst of another growth cycle in the form of what we refer to as Artificial Intelligence (AI). The speed with which this rapidly accelerating growth cycle has emerged has not disappointed and is consistent with historical patterns. Each cycle is exponentially faster than the prior cycle.

This cycle, too, has a new word that has changed its class. Compute.

Compute has historically been something one did, an activity, a verb. But in today’s parlance of AI, compute is now a thing, something that is created and measured, something sold and consumed…a noun.

Few would disagree that the AI growth cycle is indeed something significant and transformative.

Unprecedented levels of energy and capital are being poured into the creation of “compute” as our economy is being transformed, quite quickly it seems.

One way I think about AI is, in a sense, a rapid shortening of the distance between energy (power) and intelligence. Tremendous and accelerating amounts of “compute” are being created to drive that shift.

What we choose to do with the intelligence enabled by all of that “compute”, as a society and as an economy remains to be seen. Given the speed of the AI cycle, real answers could come much more quickly than most people imagine.

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