Capital moves in a day. Capacity takes years. The gap between those two facts is where the money in the AI build-out is actually being made.
That gives an investor a usable test. Does a company own a constraint that capital cannot quickly relieve? A large power transformer now carries a 128-week lead time. A grid connection in the United States takes a median of more than five years. Extreme ultraviolet lithography has exactly one supplier in the world. Software capacity, by contrast, can be added in an afternoon.
