Welcome to InfraVantage
Introducing a new research publication at the intersection of AI, digital infrastructure, and geopolitics
What is this?
InfraVantage is a joint venture between MTN Consulting and The Digital Infrastructure Collective (Asia) (TDICA), led respectively by Matt Walker and Tim Lin. This Substack publication is a key early part of the JV’s efforts.
Why InfraVantage
The name has two components. “Infra” refers to digital infrastructure: the data centers, fiber networks, energy systems, chips, and cloud platforms that underpin the AI economy. “Vantage” refers to competitive advantage: the ability of companies, governments, and militaries to use that infrastructure to gain a durable edge over rivals, or to deny rivals the same.
Infrastructure has always been a source of strategic advantage. Railroads, ports, and electricity grids determined economic winners and losers for over a century. Digital infrastructure is doing the same today, with one difference: the pace of change is faster, the capital requirements are larger, and the geopolitical stakes are higher. A data center siting decision, a chip export control, or a submarine cable route is simultaneously a financial, technological, and national security event.
InfraVantage tracks these decisions and their consequences: who builds, who gets blocked, who gains, and who falls behind. And how you can make money from all of this volatility.
The world we are entering
Just over 3 years ago, in late 2022, OpenAI released its first version of ChatGPT. There are now several LLM platforms with hundreds of millions of active monthly users, a long tail of AI-based apps with tens of millions of users, and a vast ecosystem emerging to drive even faster growth in this sector. Hyperscalers will spend well over $700 billion on capex this year. This is not just about private sector companies pursuing profit opportunities. Governments and politics have played a key role in this sector’s growth to date, and will shape it going forward. Consider what has happened in just the past few weeks:
DARPA and the US National Science Foundation jointly launched AI Forge, a program aimed at bridging the gap between commercial AI development and national security applications. President Trump signed an Executive Order to advance American AI innovation and security. The Department of Defense requested nearly $30 billion to modernize its AI supercomputing infrastructure for fiscal year 2027. US regulators moved to close a loophole that had allowed Chinese technology companies to acquire restricted NVIDIA chips through Southeast Asian data centers. Simultaneously, Microsoft partnered with G42, backed by the UAE government and Silver Lake, on a $15 billion data center expansion. The UK government launched a sovereign AI fund. The EU AI Act timeline was revised. The World Economic Forum designated AI infrastructure as critical infrastructure.
These events are interrelated. You can’t assess the tech without the politics. We are seeing the collision of capital markets, national security policy, export controls, energy constraints, and “great power” competition between the US and China.
Most existing consultancies (and Substack publications) treat these nodes separately. Financial analysts cover the capex. Policy analysts cover the regulation. Tech journalists cover the GPUs. Area specialists cover China or Southeast Asia or the Gulf. Nobody is connecting all of it, and nobody is doing so with equal fluency in the US and China contexts, and equal willingness to report what the data actually shows regardless of political loyalties.
That is what InfraVantage is for.
Two partners, ~50 years of combined experience
Matt Walker has spent over two decades advising US government agencies at the intersection of geopolitics and networks. The nature of that work was not the kind that appears on public resumes, but it gave him a working knowledge of how states think about digital infrastructure as a strategic instrument: who controls the pipes, who gets cut off, and what happens when access is weaponized. From 2000 through 2025, those networks were mostly telecom. Going forward, they are AI networks. Matt is also the founder of MTN Consulting, an independent telecom market research firm tracking over 200 global network operators, including many players in the AI market. InfraVantage leverages data from MTN Consulting as appropriate.
Tim Lin has nearly two decades of experience across real estate, technology and finance. He holds a graduate degree in real estate finance and has lived in the US, Europe and Asia. In prior roles with CBRE, Digital Realty, and DC Byte, Tim has advised leading data center operators, telcos, infrastructure/real estate funds, sovereign wealth and governments on digital infrastructure policy and strategy. He combines boardroom insight with operational fluency: understanding leasing spreads, power purchase agreements, land entitlements, and the hard reality that a gigawatt of capacity demands a decade of grid development.
Together, the two founders bring close to 50 years of real-world experience. Their shared goal: to build a best-in-class research and advisory operation tracking the role of geopolitics in developing digital infrastructure and AI markets.
Our analytical stance: equal fluency, no fixed loyalties
InfraVantage covers the US and China with the same depth and the same standards. That is a rarer capability than it sounds. Most analysts are optimized for one audience or the other, often unable to “see” the other side objectively.
We bring working expertise on both markets: the policy logic, the capital flows, the institutional actors, and the constraints each side faces that the other routinely misreads. Investors, developers, and policymakers operating across this divide need analysis that holds both pictures in frame at once, identifying opportunities and risks on each side without defaulting to either’s talking points.
We do not soften findings. When US chip export controls create arbitrage that benefits Chinese tech development more than it restricts it, we identify which officials had incentives to design them that way. When China’s Eastern Data, Western Computing initiative produces hundreds of idle data centers, we trace that outcome to local officials subsidizing construction that served their promotion prospects more than any national computing strategy. Our baseline assumption: policy is made by individuals managing their own survival and, where possible, their own financial interests. This approach has a better predictive track record than the alternatives.
What to expect
InfraVantage is in soft launch until August 2026. During this period, you can expect:
Weekly posts: short, dense, and focused on forward-looking judgment rather than headline recaps
Gradual rollout of data series, dashboards, analytic briefs, and visual tools on infravantage.ai
You are the founding subscribers. We would appreciate direct feedback: tell us what is useful, what is wrong, and what we missed. We are asking for your honest reaction to what we publish.
In August, we expect to roll out a hard launch of the full website for our JV. But the analysis starts now.
Our coverage will center on four interconnected themes: AI infrastructure buildout (data center capacity, power, and capital deployment); geopolitics and export controls (how national security policy shapes infrastructure markets); US-China dynamics (comparative analysis without partisan framing); and sovereign AI and emerging markets (Gulf states, Southeast Asia, Europe, and others building independent AI capability).
We will be wrong sometimes. When that happens we will say so and explain why.
We will disagree with each other sometimes. That’s ok. Having disagreement internally only strengthens our analysis for subscribers. Our analysis will present the facts we think are important, and our reasoned opinions, but that doesn’t mean we always agree.
We will not adjust conclusions to fit the preferences of vendors, investors, or governments.
We will be back soon with our first substantive post.
— Matt Walker and Tim Lin