Constraint Capital #2 - Feb 2026
The second issue of Constraint Capital covering the specific technical and capital constraints within AI Factories, Energy Systems, Embodied AI, Mineral Frontier, and Physical Capital Stack
Why bring all of this to CES? Well, interesting, because the biggest bottlenecks in technology today, they’re not in software. They’re actually in the physical world. AI needs more chips. Chips need minerals that are pulled from the ground. Data centers demand power more than today’s grids can provide. In the entire digital economy, needs infrastructure that can be built faster, run harder and stay online, no matter what. Those aren’t software problems. Those are problems Caterpillar is uniquely positioned to solve.
Caterpillar CEO on why they were at CES 2026
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While ARK Invest’s Big Ideas 2026 highlights the “Great Acceleration” and the multi-trillion dollar potential of converging innovation platforms, MIT Technology Review’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies provides the forensic look at the engineering hurdles we are finally clearing. Within Constraint Capital, we operate in the “gap” between these two: identifying the specific technical and capital constraints that dictate which of these visions will scale and which will stall.
We organize this and subsequent issues by the magnitude and acuteness of the constraints at hand. Our five primary sections: AI Factories, Energy Systems, Embodied AI, Mineral Frontier, and Physical Capital Stack—and the subsections within them—are ranked by the severity of the bottleneck. As these constraints shift in real-time, so does our priority stack and depth of coverage.