Fixed Assets vs. Fluid Intelligence: The FM Lens
In the mainstream tech press, Artificial Intelligence is often described as 'fluid'. We hear about it 'flowing' into every sector, scaling infinitely in the cloud, and being accessible via a simple browser window. But as an Facilities Management (FM) guru , I see it differently. When you spend your days managing the physical lifecycle of industrial assets, you learn a hard truth: Nothing is fluid without a fixed foundation. The Physical Reality of "Tokens Every time an LLM generates a response, it isn't 'thinking' in a vacuum. It is consuming a specific amount of electricity, requiring a precise degree of cooling, and occupying a slice of high-bandwidth memory (HBM). In economic terms, AI is not a service; it is a processed output of fixed capital. If we apply the lens of Capital Heterogeneity (a favorite topic of Austrian economist Ludwig Lachmann), we see that the hardware running these models isn't just a generic 'computer'. It is a h...