In late September 2026, a single AI product launch rippled outward into the global economy in ways that illuminate how deeply the fate of hardware and software have become intertwined. Meta's Muse agent, arriving into a field already crowded with established rivals, began accumulating users at a pace that markets read not merely as a product success but as evidence that the AI era is still expanding. The day AMD crossed a trillion-dollar valuation was, in this sense, less about one company's balance sheet than about collective human conviction that intelligence, increasingly artificial, will r