The Infrastructure to Power It All

This article is part of a series exploring the key themes from the Metaverse Roadmap 2007—a foresight exercise conducted nearly two decades ago by a group of developers, technologists, and futurists from the games industry.

If the Metaverse Roadmap accurately predicted the shift toward digital ownership, AI-driven intelligence, and user-generated economies, it was perhaps most prescient in recognizing that ubiquitous compute would be the foundation that made all of it possible.

We understood that virtual worlds, intelligent systems, and decentralized economies could only emerge at scale if the underlying processing power, storage, and network infrastructure could keep up.

The Roadblock: Access to Sustainable Compute Power

One major roadblock is clear—access to sustainable compute power at an immense scale.

If we are to realize a future where AI, digital ownership, and decentralized economies function as intended, we must address the fundamental questions of:

DePIN: Beyond Compute, Toward a New Coordination Layer

Much of the current conversation around DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks) focuses on compute power, distributed GPU networks, and decentralized data storage. And while that’s an important piece, the broader story is about how infrastructure itself is being redefined—not just for processing power, but for governance, coordination, and remote collaboration at scale.

We are seeing this play out across multiple domains:

This isn’t just about decentralization for the sake of ideology—it’s about structural efficiency and resilience. Centralized infrastructure is a single point of failure, and the demand for globally distributed, interoperable systems has never been higher.

Sustainability & The Future of Infrastructure

As we push toward this new reality, we have to think beyond immediate technological problems and into the sustainability challenges that come with them.

The need for:

...is no longer just about environmental responsibility—it’s a prerequisite for the future we’re building.

A lack of access to cost-effective, sustainable compute power at immense scale is a fundamental bottleneck. And this isn’t just an AI problem—it affects blockchain, Web3, and every industry relying on high-performance computing.

If the next phase of global infrastructure is built on increasingly power-hungry AI models, blockchain networks, and high-performance computing, we cannot afford to let sustainability be an afterthought.

The conversation around renewable-powered data centers, distributed energy grids, and localized compute clusters needs to be as much a part of the conversation as AI innovation itself.

The Price of Tomorrow: Why This Future Must Be Deflationary

A core part of this vision is something that Jeff Booth outlines in The Price of Tomorrow—the idea that technology is inherently deflationary.

As automation, AI, and decentralized systems take over more aspects of labor and economic coordination, the cost of production will continue to drop, and traditional economic models will be forced to adapt.

The challenge? Our current economic structures are built on inflationary principles—endless growth, debt cycles, and centralized control over money supply.

But as technology drives costs toward zero, this old model becomes increasingly unsustainable.

A New Paradigm for Digital Infrastructure

The Metaverse Roadmap saw this coming—even if the exact implementation wasn’t clear at the time.

…were always going to be the foundations of the digital future.

The real question is not whether infrastructure will evolve—but who will own and control it.