Carlyle strategist: The market is at the beginning of the next commodity supercycle

Glonghui May 18｜Jeff Currie, energy strategist and investor at Carlyle Group, stated that the market is at the beginning of the next commodity supercycle, “Go long. Buckle up and get ready for this wave of the market.” He put forward a multi-layered argument. First, the AI boom is facing major bottlenecks. Even though the combined capital expenditure of the seven major tech giants—Alphabet, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, and Amazon—is expected to exceed $700 billion by 2026, AI infrastructure is still constrained by physical resources. One major bottleneck is the supply of raw materials. Currie pointed out that the Iran conflict has triggered the largest energy supply shock in history; even if the war eventually ends, the supply pattern in the Persian Gulf—one of the world’s most important regions for energy, metals, and fertilizer—has already changed. Another bottleneck is computing power. With Anthropic, OpenAI, and DeepMind continuously advancing state-of-the-art AI models, computing power has become the core limiting factor.Secondly, as physical resources become increasingly scarce, the world is accelerating towards “de-globalization,” in contrast to the commodity supercycle of the 2000s. The model at that time was HAGO (Hard Assets, Global Operations), while the market is now shifting to the HALO (Hard Assets, Local Operations) model. In a de-globalized environment, supply chains will become tighter, and competition among countries for limited resources will be even fiercer.