Accumulation by Infrastructural Locking: Financialization, Infrastructural Power and the Mediation of Crisis in the AI Conjuncture

• In Event: AI, Digital Capitalism, and Infrastructural Power

Abstract

World-systems analysis has long diagnosed the present as an era of structural crisis marked by secular accumulation slowdowns, ecological limits, and hegemonic instability. Yet this diagnosis struggles to account for the simultaneous occurrence of unprecedented infrastructural concentration and fixed-capital formation in AI, cloud computing, and semiconductors. This paper proposes two concepts to address this paradox. Accumulation by infrastructural locking designates a mode of accumulation that stabilizes and monopolizes value by preemptively fixing the infrastructural conditions of future competition, converting uncertainty into dependency and dependency into rent. Drawing on Braudel’s concept of the upper stratum (couche supérieure) and engaging critically with Arrighi’s theory of systemic cycles, the paper reinterprets financialization not as withdrawal from material production but as the technique by which the upper stratum reorganizes conditions of circulation and access. It analyzes the three-stage mechanism—performative valuation, infrastructural commitment, locking/closure—through which financialized expectations crystallize into fixed capital, tracing this empirically through the TSMC–Nvidia–CHIPS Act nexus. Contradiction relocation captures how the systemic costs of this process are displaced along monetary, labor, ecological-energetic, and geopolitical vectors rather than resolved. The paper argues that structural crisis is neither terminal nor self-correcting: it is mediated through infrastructural power, sedimented in material systems, and deepened through its very management.

Author

• Hyeonseo Lee, SUNY-Binghamton