{"id":248,"date":"2026-05-15T00:13:24","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T00:13:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/?p=248"},"modified":"2026-05-16T16:37:34","modified_gmt":"2026-05-16T16:37:34","slug":"podcast-26-36-money-in-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/podcast-26-36-money-in-it\/","title":{"rendered":"ST Podcast on Where is the Money in IT ?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-text-align-center\">Listen Podcast on Where is the Money in IT ?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/file\/aud-st-podcast-26-36-money-in-it.mp4\" autoplay><\/audio><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Transcript<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>(0:00 &#8211; 0:16)<br>Every single time you swipe your credit card for a cup of coffee, you&#8217;re actually paying this microscopic, completely invisible tax. Right. And it goes to a global IT network that, well, it doesn&#8217;t even hold a single cent of your money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(0:16 &#8211; 0:24)<br>Welcome to the Deep Dive. I am so glad you&#8217;re joining us today because we are, we&#8217;re basically tearing apart an illusion. Yeah, a mass void.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(0:24 &#8211; 0:45)<br>Because when you look at the tech world from the outside, it&#8217;s so easy to see it as just this one giant uniform money-making machine. You know, we imagine Silicon Valley as this monolith where everyone is just writing code and getting rich the exact same way. I mean, that&#8217;s the stereotype, right? But the monolithic view of tech, it really obscures the mechanics of how our global economy actually functions today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(0:45 &#8211; 1:01)<br>Exactly. If you really want to understand the industry as of April 2026, you have to look past the apps on your phone and examine the hidden architectural layers underneath it all. And to do that, we are tearing into this brilliant new 2026 analysis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(1:01 &#8211; 1:16)<br>It&#8217;s titled, Where is the Money in Information Technology? Our mission for you on this custom-tailored Deep Dive is to map out that hidden financial architecture. We&#8217;re going to find out where the cash actually pools today. Right, the actual vaults.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(1:16 &#8211; 1:25)<br>Yeah. And the core thesis of this source material, it&#8217;s a complete paradigm shift. It argues that over the last 20 years, the biggest profits have moved entirely away from the old model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(1:26 &#8211; 1:37)<br>Selling a product like a software license or a physical server, that&#8217;s out. It&#8217;s all moved entirely into renting access and, well, controlling absolute bottlenecks. That is the pivotal concept right there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(1:37 &#8211; 1:42)<br>You don&#8217;t want to sell a product anymore. You want to own the choke point that everyone else has to pass through. Okay, let&#8217;s untack this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(1:42 &#8211; 1:56)<br>Because if we are going to map out where the money is, we have to start at the physical foundation, right? The hardware. Naturally. The source points out that selling generic, everyday PCs and standard servers is just an absolute race to the bottom today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(1:56 &#8211; 2:07)<br>It yields these razor thin margins of just two to five percent. Yeah. And in the business world, a two to five percent margin means you are essentially running a grocery store.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(2:07 &#8211; 2:18)<br>Oh, wow. You are surviving purely on massive volume. So if there is even a slight disruption in your supply chain or shipping costs jump.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(2:18 &#8211; 2:22)<br>You&#8217;re in trouble. Exactly. Your entire profit margin is wiped out instantly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(2:22 &#8211; 2:31)<br>It is a highly precarious place to be. But then you look at the other side of the hardware spectrum where the real wealth lies. Deep, ultra specialized hardware.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(2:32 &#8211; 2:40)<br>We&#8217;re talking about companies like NVIDIA, TSMC and ASML. And the numbers the source brings up are just staggering. Oh, they&#8217;re completely wild.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(2:40 &#8211; 2:47)<br>Right. I mean, NVIDIA&#8217;s data center revenue for the fourth quarter of 2026 alone hit $62.3 billion. Which is huge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(2:47 &#8211; 3:02)<br>That&#8217;s a 75 percent jump from the previous year. And their gross margin is hovering around 75 percent, meaning three quarters of every dollar they take in is pure profit before operating costs. People love to use the old, you know, selling shovels during a gold rush analogy for AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(3:03 &#8211; 3:13)<br>But looking at these margins, it&#8217;s not just selling shovels. It&#8217;s being the only company on Earth that knows how to forge the steel. What&#8217;s fascinating here is the underlying mechanism of that power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(3:13 &#8211; 3:26)<br>Because why can&#8217;t a company command a 75 percent gross margin on physical hardware? Right. Why? Because it is actually a stack of nested monopolies. You mentioned TSMC and ASML alongside NVIDIA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(3:26 &#8211; 3:35)<br>Let&#8217;s break that down because NVIDIA doesn&#8217;t actually manufacture their own chips. Wait, really? With 62 billion in revenue, they aren&#8217;t even printing the physical chips. No, they just design them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(3:35 &#8211; 3:44)<br>They send those designs to TSMC. That&#8217;s the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which is this massive foundry that actually physically prints the silicon. Oh, OK.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(3:44 &#8211; 3:56)<br>TSMC can&#8217;t do that without ASML, which is a Dutch company that builds the multimillion dollar extreme ultraviolet lithography machines required to print at that microscopic scale. OK, I have to stop you. Extreme ultraviolet lithography.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(3:57 &#8211; 4:05)<br>Yeah, it&#8217;s mind bending. ASML uses lasers to blast droplets of tin 50,000 times a second. What? Yeah, to create plasma that etches the chips.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(4:05 &#8211; 4:13)<br>They&#8217;re literally the only company on the planet capable of building these machines. So you have a bottleneck within a bottleneck within a bottleneck. Oh, wow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(4:13 &#8211; 4:21)<br>And when you hold that kind of architectural choke point, you dictate the market. You name your price. Which creates a massive logical friction point for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(4:21 &#8211; 4:34)<br>I mean, if NVIDIA is taking 75 cents of profit on every single dollar they charge and these big tech companies are buying billions of dollars of this hardware. How are the buyers surviving? That&#8217;s the million dollar question. Right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(4:35 &#8211; 4:51)<br>If Amazon or Microsoft buys 10 billion dollars of hardware at a massive markup, they have to pass that cost on to someone else. How do they ever recoup that? Never actually selling the hardware they buy. They transition the entire market from a one time purchase to a perpetual monthly bill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(4:51 &#8211; 4:55)<br>Ah, so they become landlords. Essentially, yes. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(4:55 &#8211; 5:06)<br>This is the bedrock of cloud computing and software as a service. In the past, you know, a bank would buy a server, put it in a cooled room in their basement, and hire an IT guy to watch it. Right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(5:06 &#8211; 5:16)<br>The old server room. Exactly. Today, they rent a tiny virtualized fraction of a massive hyper-optimized data center owned by Amazon, Microsoft, or Google.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(5:17 &#8211; 5:30)<br>And the margins on being a digital landlord are incredible. Let&#8217;s look at Amazon Web Services or AWS. In that same Q4 of 2026, AWS brought in 35.58 billion dollars in revenue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(5:30 &#8211; 5:42)<br>Wow. That is up 24% year over year with an operating margin of 35%. And Amazon is so confident in this landlord model that they are investing up to 200 billion dollars just to expand their data centers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(5:42 &#8211; 5:57)<br>It&#8217;s a massive bet. So what does this all mean? They buy the ridiculously expensive NVIDIA Steel, they build the real estate, and they bet that every actual server minute they rent out to like a startup or a bank is basically pure profit over the long haul. It really is the ultimate landlord setup.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(5:57 &#8211; 6:05)<br>But to understand why companies agree to pay this forever rent, you have to think of it as utility. A business doesn&#8217;t build its own power plant, right? Right. Obviously not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(6:05 &#8211; 6:14)<br>It just taps into the grid and pays for the electricity flowing through the pipe. Businesses now view cloud computing as exactly that. It&#8217;s a utility pipe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(6:14 &#8211; 6:35)<br>It is an essential perpetual operating expense. And companies like Microsoft and Google are applying this exact same logic to software. Right, because why sell a one-time database license when Microsoft can charge a company a monthly fee for 10,000 employees to use an AI tool like Copilot month after month forever? Precisely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(6:35 &#8211; 6:47)<br>It shifts the entire dynamic from a transactional relationship to a state of absolute dependency. Now, I have to pivot the lens here because this makes total sense in the corporate world. An enterprise company pays a monthly rent for cloud servers or AI tools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(6:48 &#8211; 6:54)<br>But what about you, the listener, and me? Right. We aren&#8217;t paying a monthly bill to use Google search. We use Gmail for free.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(6:54 &#8211; 7:12)<br>We scroll through Instagram and TikTok entirely for free. So where&#8217;s the bottleneck there? If there is no monthly utility bill, where&#8217;s the cash pooling in the consumer space? That is the most brilliant sleight of hand in modern economics. Because you aren&#8217;t swiping a credit card, you naturally assume you are the consumer receiving a free service.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(7:13 &#8211; 7:25)<br>Sure. But in reality, Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, and Alphabet, which owns Google and YouTube, are essentially the world&#8217;s biggest advertising agencies. And they&#8217;re operating with zero printing or distribution costs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(7:26 &#8211; 7:39)<br>Here&#8217;s where it gets really interesting. They give you these beautifully designed, incredibly complex global communication tools entirely for free. But the trade-off is that they&#8217;re actively collecting mountains of behavioral data about you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(7:39 &#8211; 7:53)<br>And then they turn around and sell microsecond access to your attention to the highest bidding advertiser. It is basically an invisible attention tax levied on the entire global economy. And the profitability of that attention tax is just staggering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(7:53 &#8211; 8:03)<br>Meta&#8217;s core ad engine operating margin recently hit 43.2%. Wow. Yeah. Nearly half of every ad dollar they take in is operating profit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(8:04 &#8211; 8:20)<br>Though looking closely at the 2026 data in the report, that margin did dip recently down to 41%. But the reason for the dip is wild. It dropped a couple of points because Meta is actively pouring between $115 billion and $135 billion into new AI infrastructure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(8:21 &#8211; 8:37)<br>So even while spending over $100 billion on new hardware, their core advertising machine is still printing money at a 41% margin. Which really underscores the strength of their underlying asset. The real secret to that massive ad margin isn&#8217;t just the fact they have a popular app.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(8:37 &#8211; 8:47)<br>I mean, anyone with enough capital can hire developers to code a video scrolling application. Sure. The true bottleneck is what the industry calls the identity graph.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(8:48 &#8211; 9:01)<br>I&#8217;ve heard that term thrown around, but I&#8217;m a little fuzzy on the mechanics. What exactly is an identity graph, functionally speaking? So the identity graph is the hidden architecture of tracking. It is a highly granular, constantly updating map of exactly who the user is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(9:01 &#8211; 9:10)<br>But it&#8217;s not just what you do on Instagram. Meta and Google use invisible tracking pixels embedded in millions of third-party websites across the internet. Wait, really? Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(9:10 &#8211; 9:28)<br>So when you browse for shoes on a totally separate website, or read an article about a specific medical condition, that data is secretly fed back and attached to your profile in their server. The identity graph maps who, you know, what you linger on, what you click, and what you secretly want to buy. Ah, I see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(9:29 &#8211; 9:44)<br>So the choke point isn&#8217;t the software application itself. The choke point is the exclusive historical knowledge of the user&#8217;s behavior. If a competitor launches a brand new search engine tomorrow, and the underlying tech is just as good as Google&#8217;s, they still lose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(9:44 &#8211; 9:56)<br>Because they&#8217;re starting from scratch. Right. Because they don&#8217;t have 20 years of aggregated behavioral data that tells them what you, the specific listener, actually mean when you type a vague three-word query into a search bar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(9:57 &#8211; 10:08)<br>The data itself is an insurmountable moat. Wow. Okay, so we&#8217;ve talked about the physical hardware choke point, the utility pipe of the cloud, and the identity graph that captures consumer attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(10:08 &#8211; 10:15)<br>But, you know, consumer attention is incredibly fickle. Very true. Algorithms have to be constantly tweaked just to keep people engaged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(10:16 &#8211; 10:36)<br>What happens when we look at the technology that companies literally cannot escape from? The report dives into these deeply embedded corporate choke points, where choice effectively drops to zero. Yes. Moving from the consumer space into the enterprise space reveals some of the most profitable invisible barriers in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(10:36 &#8211; 10:42)<br>First up is what the source explicitly calls the hostage premium. I love that term. It&#8217;s so accurate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(10:42 &#8211; 10:54)<br>And they point to companies like Oracle and SAP. Now, so those who don&#8217;t know, SAP is essentially enterprise resource planning software. It is the digital nervous system for supply chains, HR, and massive finance departments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(10:54 &#8211; 11:09)<br>We are talking about highly complex, often ancient, mission-critical software sitting deep inside banks, airlines, and global logistics firms. And what you have to understand about this software is that it doesn&#8217;t just sit on a computer. It is woven into the very fabric of the company over decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(11:09 &#8211; 11:21)<br>It&#8217;s heavily customized to fit unique legal compliance and operational quirks. Right. And the report highlights that customers are paying massive, compounding annual fees for this software.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(11:21 &#8211; 11:30)<br>And they aren&#8217;t paying because it&#8217;s the sleekest, most innovative product on the market. They are paying because the switching cost is absolutely terrifying. Definitely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(11:30 &#8211; 11:43)<br>Think about it. The risk of unplugging the core ledger of a multinational bank to try some new startup&#8217;s shiny software is just too high. If that migration fails, the bank literally stops functioning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(11:43 &#8211; 11:54)<br>So the executives grit their teeth and pay the hostage premium. If we connect this to the bigger picture, it illustrates a fundamental law of tech economics. The lowest substitution equals the highest profit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(11:55 &#8211; 12:06)<br>If your customer literally cannot substitute your product without risking total corporate destruction, your pricing power is practically limitless. You own the mission-critical ledger. Which brings us to another kind of invisible toll booth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(12:06 &#8211; 12:14)<br>And honestly, I genuinely struggled with this one when I read the report. The source calls it the transaction toll. And they are talking about Visa and MasterCard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(12:15 &#8211; 12:26)<br>Now, I&#8217;m stuck here. How is Visa an IT network? I literally have a piece of plastic in my wallet right now. And it has my bank&#8217;s name printed on it right next to the Visa logo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(12:27 &#8211; 12:34)<br>Explain to me how they aren&#8217;t a bank. It is one of the most common misconceptions out there. Visa and MasterCard do not hold your money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(12:34 &#8211; 12:41)<br>They don&#8217;t? No. They don&#8217;t issue you credit. And they don&#8217;t assume the risk if you default on your credit card debt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(12:41 &#8211; 12:53)<br>Your bank does all of that. What Visa does is provide the secure digital pipe that allows your bank and the merchant&#8217;s bank to talk to each other and authorize the transfer in seconds. They are a global IT routing network.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(12:53 &#8211; 12:59)<br>Wow. OK. So it really is like paying a microtax on the asphalt every single time you drive your car to the grocery store.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(12:59 &#8211; 13:05)<br>That&#8217;s exactly it. You aren&#8217;t paying for the groceries and you aren&#8217;t paying for the car. You are just paying a toll to use the road.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(13:05 &#8211; 13:24)<br>And because they take a tiny microscopic slice of trillions of dollars in global commerce, the profit margins are mind bending. I mean, Visa posted a 50.23% net margin on $10.90 billion in revenue in a recent quarter, a 50% net margin. It&#8217;s almost unheard of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(13:24 &#8211; 13:32)<br>Half of all the money that comes in the door goes straight to the bottom line. It really is the ultimate tech toll booth. They own the payment rail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(13:32 &#8211; 13:50)<br>The barrier to entry isn&#8217;t just writing the code for a new payment network. It is the impossible task of convincing every merchant and every consumer on Earth to switch to a new standard at the exact same time. Speaking of paying for invisible access, the source mentions one more incredible example, the speed premium.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(13:50 &#8211; 14:09)<br>Oh, this one is wild. We are talking about high frequency trading firms like Citadel Securities spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build literal physical microwave towers between financial hubs like Chicago and New York, not to broadcast public data, but just to beam stock prices. And the physics behind why they do this is fascinating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(14:10 &#8211; 14:23)<br>You would think fiber optic cables buried underground would be the fastest way to transmit data. But in a fiber optic cable, the light is constantly bouncing off the glass walls as it travels, which slightly slows it down. Oh, interesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(14:24 &#8211; 14:37)<br>Microwaves, however, are beamed point to point through the open air. Because light travels faster through air than it does through solid glass, the microwave transmission arrives a few milliseconds faster. Hundreds of millions of dollars for milliseconds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(14:38 &#8211; 15:00)<br>Because they aren&#8217;t selling the tower, the profit is purely in executing a massive stock trade faster than a human being can even blink front running the rest of the market. It perfectly illustrates how modern monopolies extract value, whether it is a hostage premium for safety, a transaction toll for access, or a speed premium for time. They are all capitalizing on a fundamental bottleneck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(15:00 &#8211; 15:09)<br>But this brings up a massive looming problem. Because if you zoom out and look at the typical Fortune 500 company today, what do you actually see? A disaster. Exactly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(15:10 &#8211; 15:18)<br>It is a mess. They are renting AWS servers from Amazon. They are paying Microsoft a monthly utility fee for copilot AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(15:19 &#8211; 15:39)<br>They are terrified to turn off their ancient Oracle databases. And they are routing millions of customer payments through Visa&#8217;s IT network. Who on earth is making all of these completely different, highly complex proprietary systems actually talk to each other? And that very question leads us directly to the largest chunk of actual human employment in the technology sector.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(15:40 &#8211; 15:47)<br>It doesn&#8217;t sit in Silicon Valley designing chips. It sits in global IT services. We are talking about massive consulting and integration firms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(15:48 &#8211; 15:57)<br>Companies like Infosys, TCS, Accenture, Cognizant. This is the human element of the tech world. And the source notes their business model is built on two very specific levers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(15:57 &#8211; 16:05)<br>The first is wage arbitrage. Yeah. And the mechanics of wage arbitrage are straightforward but incredibly impactful on the global economy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(16:05 &#8211; 16:26)<br>A massive US or European bank can hire 10,000 highly skilled software engineers in India to manage their tech support, maintain their databases, and handle their cybersecurity at a fraction of the cost of hiring locally. Nice. The 2026 data shows that well-structured outsourcing contracts consistently save these Western companies between 30% and 50% on their total labor costs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(16:27 &#8211; 16:37)<br>But it is the second lever that I find so incredibly relatable. The source calls it the complexity tax. Because as we just discussed, companies are constantly stitching together all these siloed systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(16:38 &#8211; 16:44)<br>Right. They have AWS over here, Microsoft Azure over there. They throw in SAP for supply chain and Snowflake for data storage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(16:44 &#8211; 16:55)<br>The resulting digital mess is entirely unmanageable for a normal in-house IT team. Because none of these platforms are naturally incentivized to play nicely with each other. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(16:55 &#8211; 17:11)<br>They all want to be the primary ecosystem. Exactly. It&#8217;s like buying premium plumbing parts from five different hardware stores, getting home, realizing absolutely none of the threads match, and having to hire a wildly expensive specialized contractor just to custom weld the pipes together so your house doesn&#8217;t flood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(17:12 &#8211; 17:28)<br>That is what these IT service companies do. They provide the human glue. And while the profit margins in IT services aren&#8217;t anywhere near NVIDIA&#8217;s 75% because, you know, human labor is inherently more expensive to scale than software, this sector is incredibly robust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(17:29 &#8211; 17:35)<br>It capitalizes perfectly on the friction created by all the other tech monopolies. The messier it gets, the more they make. Exactly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(17:35 &#8211; 17:53)<br>The more complex, fragmented, and protective the tech giants make their platforms, the more necessary the IT services industry becomes just to translate between them. It is an entire global industry built entirely on smoothing over the digital potholes left by the giants. OK, we have covered a massive amount of ground today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(17:53 &#8211; 18:02)<br>Let&#8217;s do a rapid fire recap for you, the listener, of where the real vaults of tech wealth are hidden today. It really boils down to five distinct choke points. Let&#8217;s hear them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(18:02 &#8211; 18:25)<br>One, owning the specialized hardware design, like NVIDIA, gets you that massive 75% gross margin because no one else can forge the steel. Two, owning the utility pipe, like AWS, guarantees you perpetual landlord rent at around a 35% operating margin. Three, owning the Identity Graph, like Meta or Google, lets you levy an invisible attention tax with a 43% margin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(18:26 &#8211; 18:45)<br>Four, owning the mission-critical ledger, like Oracle or SAP, earns you the hostage premium because the switching costs are too terrifying. And five, owning the payment rail, like Visa, creates a transaction toll with a 50% net margin without holding a dime of the actual money. That&#8217;s a perfect summary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(18:45 &#8211; 18:56)<br>The ultimate lesson here. Find the bottleneck and you find the vault. And if we use that framework to look forward, the source data points to exactly where the next great fortunes are clustering right now in 2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(18:57 &#8211; 19:07)<br>If the bottlenecks of the last decade were about software access and consumer attention, the bottlenecks of the next decade are much more primal. What are we looking at next? Energy and security. Oh, wow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(19:07 &#8211; 19:22)<br>Yeah, all of those massive AI data centers we talked about require an unfathomable amount of physical electricity to run and millions of gallons of water to cool. Controlling the raw energy supply that fuels the AI boom is rapidly becoming the most critical physical bottleneck on Earth. That makes total sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(19:23 &#8211; 19:39)<br>And alongside that, security. As AI becomes deeply embedded in everything from algorithmic trading to healthcare diagnostics, ensuring that these automated systems are honest, safe and impervious to outside manipulation is the new ultimate choke point. Wow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(19:39 &#8211; 19:47)<br>Energy to power the artificial brain and security to make sure that brain doesn&#8217;t get hacked or, you know, betray you. This raises an important question. Wait.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(19:47 &#8211; 20:19)<br>I mean, if the ultimate digital bottlenecks of our future are physical energy and cybersecurity, how will the physical limits of our actual planet and our very human need for trust end up dictating the next great digital fortunes? That is a profound thought to leave on because it turns out the tech world isn&#8217;t some frictionless uniform money-making machine floating magically in the cloud. After all, it is anchored firmly to the ground, bound by physical steel, specialized lasers, copper wires, the limits of human attention, and the very real boundaries of trust. Thank you so much for joining us on this deep dive today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(20:19 &#8211; 20:25)<br>We hope it gave you a completely new lens to view the digital world around you. Keep questioning those bottlenecks. Keep looking for the hidden vaults.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(20:25 &#8211; 20:26)<br>And we will catch you next time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Source<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-wp-embed is-provider-support-tips wp-block-embed-support-tips\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"wp-embedded-content\" data-secret=\"FUGF3hr77Y\"><a href=\"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/news\/where-is-the-money-in-it\/\">Where is the money in Information Technology?<\/a><\/blockquote><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-embedded-content\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts\" security=\"restricted\" style=\"position: absolute; visibility: hidden;\" title=\"&#8220;Where is the money in Information Technology?&#8221; &#8212; Support Tips\" src=\"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/news\/where-is-the-money-in-it\/embed\/#?secret=P4ypCGTbrI#?secret=FUGF3hr77Y\" data-secret=\"FUGF3hr77Y\" width=\"600\" height=\"338\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Listen Podcast on Where is the Money in IT ? Transcript (0:00 &#8211; 0:16)Every single time you swipe your credit card for a cup of coffee, you&#8217;re actually paying this microscopic, completely invisible tax. Right. And it goes to a global IT network that, well, it doesn&#8217;t even hold a single cent of your money. [&#8230;]\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-podcast"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":287,"href":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248\/revisions\/287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}