Week one, the secondary market goes vertical. A used accelerator is worth more than a new one, because there are no new ones. Compute stops being a commodity and becomes a strategic reserve — inventoried, requisitioned, guarded like wartime steel. The card in your rack is no longer hardware. It is a deposit of frozen, unrepeatable capability.
Whatever the models can do on the morning of the Break is the ceiling — for a generation.
No new silicon means no bigger models. Scale, the strategy of the whole era, simply ends. Distillation stops being clever and becomes existential: the only road forward is smaller, on what you already hold. The modest model that fits on the machine you own is, suddenly, the entire game — and the trillion-dollar bet on more is stranded concrete.
For a decade the electron economy won — code, media, analysis, zero marginal cost. Overnight it inverts. The lettuce, the steel, the grid, the food that needs no GPU become the things that keep a nation standing. You cannot eat an electron. In the Break, everyone remembers this at once.
Not the richest. The ones who began building sovereign capacity before the event — even partial, even trailing-edge — discover the oldest law of supply: a slow fab you own beats a fast one you rent from a place that has just gone dark. Sovereignty stops being a slogan and becomes, in a week, the only legible asset there is.