Who captures the value, and who picks up the tab

Up to this point, this guide has talked about your job, your team, your company. This chapter follows the money. Everything before this described the same thing seen up close: value leaving work to settle somewhere else. Which leaves the question almost nobody really asks. Where does that value go, and who ends up paying the tab.

Intelligence is worth nothing anymore; the machine that produces it is worth everything

Take the formula from Mistral’s CEO again — it has come up several times here. Intelligence, from now on, is electricity converted into tokens. It can be manufactured in near-unlimited quantities, and its price is collapsing, fifty to seventy percent a year on models, as we saw in chapter four. The service is becoming commonplace. In the strict sense, it becomes a commodity, a good without scarcity that nobody manages to sell at a premium anymore.

But look at the other end of the chain. If the service is worth nothing anymore, the means of producing it is following exactly the opposite path. Physical computing power — the processors, the data centers, the electricity that feeds them — is becoming the scarce resource. And a scarce resource, when the whole world starts wanting it, doesn’t stay a mere expense line for long.

Compute just hit the trading floor

Here is the fact, and it’s brand new. On May 12, 2026, the world’s largest derivatives marketplace, CME, and Silicon Data, the company that publishes the first daily indices of GPU rental prices, announced the launch of the first futures market on computing power. It isn’t open yet — it’s waiting for the regulator’s green light — but the direction is set. The CME’s chairman summed it up in one sentence: compute is the new oil of the century. The founder of the fund behind the index went further: he sees it as the biggest commodity of the world to come.

Take the measure of what that means, because this is not a story for financiers. When a resource goes from being an operating expense to an asset that can be priced, hedged and traded, the same thing always happens, in the same order. Oil lived through it in 1983. From that moment on, those who held the physical resource stopped being mere suppliers. Capital started flowing toward them, their cost of financing collapsed, and a new aristocracy of rentiers was born — those who already owned the wells before the market turned them into gold.

For you, reading this guide from an HR department, the lesson isn’t financial, it’s brutal. The machinery being put in place has one single effect: guaranteeing that money will keep flowing into AI, no matter what. Don’t bet for a second on a slowdown. Finance just built the pipe that ensures acceleration. So the pressure on jobs and skills won’t slow down either.

What Mensch came to say, at the scale of a continent

That is exactly what Arthur Mensch, Mistral’s CEO, came to explain before the French National Assembly’s commission of inquiry on May 12, 2026. Go watch it — it’s freely available, the link is at the bottom of the chapter. His thesis: AI is not software, it’s infrastructure; it turns electricity into intelligence, and whoever controls that conversion captures a share of the value produced by everyone else. He put a number on the risk for Europe: a possible deficit on the order of a trillion euros a year, the equivalent of ten percent of the continent’s payroll, flowing to those who manufacture that intelligence elsewhere.

And he stated the entry ticket. Building one gigawatt of computing capacity costs about fifty billion dollars. While American players are already committing trillions to corner the physical resources — processors and energy — Europe watches, for want of capital markets up to the task. The Draghi report had already traced the slope: Europe’s share of global tech revenue fell from twenty-two to eighteen percent in ten years, while the United States’ climbed from thirty to thirty-eight. Mensch puts a word on what comes next if nothing changes within two years: vassal states.

I’m not making this about flags. The question is not who wins the race. The question is that value is switching sides, and that movement is global. Europe simply sits on the wrong side of the conversion.

We had ideas, for want of oil

There’s a slogan France grew up with, born of the oil shock. We have no oil, but we have ideas. Gray matter versus raw materials, the pride of a country that made up for the missing resource with ingenuity. That formula has just turned against itself. If intelligence is nothing more than transformed electricity, then ideas are no longer the immaterial, free resource we used to set against crude. They have become crude. A raw material extracted with energy, capital and silicon.

And here’s the surprise: France has the new oil. Its low-carbon electron — nuclear, partly in surplus — is exactly the input needed to feed data centers. France isn’t going from we have ideas to nothing. It’s going to energy, and talent. Two cards out of three.

That leaves the third, and it’s the whole game. Capital, and the place where the rent gets captured. Oil showed it: the people who get richest aren’t always the ones pumping the crude, they’re the ones trading it. The futures market on compute is opening in Chicago, not Paris. The risk for France, then, isn’t running out of ideas. It’s supplying the electron while the value flees elsewhere — into trading, into models, into the software layer. Being the electric emirate of a system it doesn’t own. Rich in input, poor in rent.

Getting out of that trap comes down to three moves, and none of them is out of reach. First, convert the electron into intelligence here, on the soil where it’s produced, instead of exporting it raw and then buying back, at full price, the intelligence extracted from it. Because that is exactly what’s in the works — chapter eight showed it. The value goes off to be manufactured elsewhere, then comes back to be sold to European companies through the contracts the consulting firms have stitched up with the giants. We supply the material, we buy back the finished product. Losing twice.

The second move is more technical, and decisive. Never tie yourself to a single model or a single vendor. Build your use cases so you can swap engines without breaking everything; keep the process portable from one shop to the next. Perfect portability doesn’t exist — it has a cost, and it caps the power a little. But being able to leave at a reasonable cost is precisely what the hostages of the lock-in described earlier were missing. It’s the only insurance against the bill that keeps climbing.

The third: give vendors rooted here a real chance. Not out of patriotism — out of arithmetic. A vendor subject to European law, taxation and labor law reinjects part of the value into the very ecosystem that funds our social model. The one capturing the rent in Chicago does not. The point isn’t to shut the others out, but to stop disqualifying European solutions from tenders by default just because they don’t come from Silicon Valley. To let them take the lead when they can. It’s less a posture than a long-term calculation.

The question nobody asks: who will pay for social protection

Now, the blind spot. The real one. The one I haven’t heard mentioned anywhere — not from politicians, not at conferences.

In our economies, work doesn’t just feed the person doing it. It funds social protection. Contributions levied on wages pay for pensions, healthcare, unemployment, long-term care. Our entire social model rests on a base, and that base is work.

Now, what has this guide described, chapter after chapter? Value is leaving work. It’s migrating to capital — more precisely to an asset, computing power, that is being financialized as we speak, that will be held by a handful of players, and lightly taxed. Put the two ends together. The base that funds our social protection is draining away at the precise moment wealth is concentrating in something that isn’t work, and that we don’t know how — or don’t want — to tax for it.

And this isn’t a 2040 problem. Remember the tempo, from chapter six. Job cuts are immediate; new job creation is slow. Between the two opens a gap of several years. It’s precisely during that gap that the transition would need to be funded — supporting people, paying for retraining. At the very moment, in other words, when the base starts to give way.

Don’t tell me the debate exists. It surfaced once, then faded. The robot tax, championed in 2017 by Benoît Hamon in France and floated the same year by Bill Gates, remained a campaign curiosity — theoretical, with no follow-up. Here and there, we have begun decoupling social financing from wages alone — the CSG, the so-called social VAT. But at the margins, never at the scale of the shock that’s coming, nor on the factor that now captures the value. The debate isn’t settled; it isn’t even open. Because to open it, you would first have to state the finding. And the finding hasn’t been made.

That’s where the figure from Jérémy Lamri, the founder of Tomorrow Theory, takes on its full meaning. I heard him advance an idea at a conference that stuck with me: past a certain level of unemployment, something like fifteen percent, it’s no longer a business problem — the whole system seizes up. Nobody can vouch for the exact threshold. The order of magnitude is enough. If employment contracts while the social base gives way, we’re no longer talking about optimization, we’re talking about a country’s equilibrium. Those are the questions that need asking. Not in ten years. Now.

And me — what can I do

That’s the question you’re left with, after a chapter about exchanges, continents and billions.

Let me be honest about what I’d like, and about what I see. What I’d like is for everyone to wake up and really look. For nobody to stop at I typed three prompts into ChatGPT, it’s cute, but it makes up half of what it says. Because what this guide has laid out — the curve, the equation, the jobs that are mutating, the value switching sides — is much, much bigger than that.

What I see is more down-to-earth. Until you’ve experimented yourself, touched the impact with your own fingers, you don’t feel concerned. And you don’t have the bandwidth to get started, because you’re drowning in day-to-day management that doesn’t always deliver the most value. You can’t project yourself onto something you haven’t lived through and don’t have an hour to look at. I don’t blame anyone for it. That’s the real state of HR departments, and you have to start from there, not from where you’d like them to be.

Add a constraint that is no small detail. Your data is among the most sensitive there is — your candidates’, your employees’. You cannot hand it over to just any tool plugged into just any cloud. You need to be able to trust, and trust can’t be decreed.

That is exactly the observation my answer was born from. Not a cathedral, no ambition to replace your big systems. The opposite. Small, simple things, built with knowledge of the trade, that remove a chore and give you back an hour. That’s the first step, and it’s the whole point of the final chapter.