Elon Musk says artificial intelligence is “manifesting” — leaving software and reshaping the physical world. In this DeepDive, Tom Sayja unpacks what that means for markets, materials, and energy, and why the next trillion-dollar opportunities may be built from metal, not code.
You’re listening to the DeepDive — where we separate noise from structure and talk about the systems behind wealth, innovation, and consequence. I’m Tom Sayja.
Today we’re looking at something Elon Musk calls Manifested AI. It’s one of those phrases that sounds abstract at first — like a headline made for social media — until you realize it describes something that’s already happening all around us.
Most people still think of artificial intelligence as software. Lines of code, cloud servers, a chatbot that can write a haiku. But the reality is changing fast.
AI is leaving the screen. It’s moving into engines, robots, satellites, and energy grids. It’s not just learning how to think — it’s learning how to act.
That’s what “manifested” really means. Intelligence is showing up in the physical world. And when it does, it behaves like any other industrial revolution — it consumes resources, reorganizes supply chains, and creates new dependencies that investors and policymakers can’t ignore.
Let’s take Musk’s own ecosystem as the case study. xAI develops reasoning models. Tesla turns those models into motion. Starlink connects them through low-orbit bandwidth. And SpaceX moves the hardware that ties it all together.
That’s not a collection of companies — that’s a vertical stack. Data, energy, and mobility forming a single system. A living network where learning loops through every component.
If you’ve followed my writing on the DeepDive Letter, you know I call this stage the physicalization of intelligence. Every previous wave of technology started as abstraction and ended as infrastructure. The telegraph turned into railroads. Electricity turned into power grids. Digital networks turned into fiber and data centers. Now AI is turning into hardware, materials, and power density.
Each wave follows the same pattern: mechanism, cost, constraint, and cycle. For Manifested AI, the mechanism is distributed cognition. The cost is energy. The constraint is scale. And the cycle — the part investors should be watching — is industrial build-out.
Let’s talk about those costs for a minute. Every model that runs a robot, a car, or a factory floor requires chips made from rare metals. Copper, nickel, lithium, silver. Each of those metals has a supply curve, and every supply curve has friction. That friction is where new markets are born.
The same thing is happening in energy. As AI expands, power demand expands faster. We’re already seeing utilities project double-digit load growth just from data-center construction. That’s not an app trend — that’s an infrastructure transformation.
It’s also why I’ve written about what I call AI Metals and Quantum Keystone Energy — the physical backbones of cognition. These are the invisible enablers of what everyone else calls the “AI economy.”
Now, it’s worth noting that not everyone shares Musk’s timeline. Technology analyst Derek Goudy, who I respect, points out that physics and regulation always move slower than capital. And he’s right. The infrastructure phase will take years. But every major market cycle does. Patience is not optional when you’re building foundations.
For most investors, the lesson is simple: Don’t chase headlines — study the constraints. The constraint tells you where value will appear next.
If we accept that AI is manifesting — literally taking physical form — then the real frontier isn’t another algorithm. It’s the systems that make those algorithms possible: power generation, materials extraction, and global connectivity.
That’s why I call this the next trillion-dollar tech cycle. Not because a single company will cross that mark, but because the underlying build-out will. The intelligence economy will sit on top of the materials economy — the same way the internet sat on top of telecommunications.
So, what do we take away from Musk’s Manifested AI vision? First, intelligence is no longer weightless. Second, markets are rotating from code to capacity. And third, opportunity now lies in the tangible — the wires, metals, and energy that make cognition possible.
Musk’s version of the future may not be perfect, but the direction is clear. AI is moving out of the lab and into the landscape. And that means the next chapter of innovation will look less like Silicon Valley and more like the industrial age reborn — powered not by steam, but by silicon and electrons.
That’s the DeepDive. Thanks for listening. Tom Sayja - The DeepDive Letter and Podcast City: New York Address: 505 LaGuardia Place Website: https://tomsayja.net/