Editor's Letter
The Return of Where
For thirty years, location was treated as a solved problem. The first six months of 2026 were an extended argument against that assumption.
The idea had a founding text: in 1997 Frances Cairncross gave the era its slogan, The Death of Distance. She was half right, the most expensive way to be wrong. Distance died for the bit, the email crossing the planet overnight. It never died for the electricity, the land and the water those bits demand. The first half of 2026 was the invoice, arriving thirty years late.
The half-year’s biggest numbers all point one way. The IEA expects global electricity demand to grow 3.6 percent a year through 2030, adding roughly 1,100 terawatt hours annually, all landing somewhere specific: a grid, a substation, a permit office. Chip-tool sales are heading for a record 165.9 billion dollars in 2026, sited for reasons unrelated to cost. SIPRI counted 2,887 billion dollars of military spending in 2025; defence is the most literal case of the instinct, money to hold ground.
It all flows from that. AI turns out to be a physical industry in a software costume: it needs power, cooling, land, fibre, silicon and people, all with addresses. Picture a large data centre not as a computer but as an aluminium smelter that happens to think, turning cheap power into something you can sell, planted where the electricity is, not the people. Industrial policy became an operating system: a state that believes location matters will pay to own the locations that count.
Africa’s quarter carried the same signature. The African Development Bank released its 2026 outlook in Brazzaville in May, projecting 4.2 percent continental growth. The headline conceals more than it reveals: twenty-two economies grew above 5 percent in 2025, and twelve of the world’s twenty fastest-growing economies were African. The continental average describes almost none of them.
Washington said the same from the other side. AGOA lapsed in September 2025, was restored by law in February 2026 with retroactive effect, and now expires again on 31 December. The preference survived; the predictability did not. South African vehicle exports to the United States collapsed by roughly three quarters, from 25,544 units to 6,530. A one-year renewal tells a plant manager near Gqeberha that access to America’s market is now an annual political call.
The binding constraint was gloriously unglamorous: not the model, not the chip, not the engineer shortage everyone feared, but the interconnection queue, the years-long wait to plug new load into the grid. The most futuristic industry of the decade is rationed by one of its most nineteenth-century bottlenecks: the wire. Ask me where the boom will be settled, and I have stopped pointing at laboratories and started pointing at substations.
One version of this curdles into fatalism: geography as destiny, the map already decided. It is wrong, and the evidence is in the same data. South African automakers lost three quarters of one market and still closed 2025 with record total exports of 414,268 vehicles, because they found new buyers faster than most expected. Geography constrains which routes are open; it does not decide which one an operator takes.
Terrain raises the cost of being wrong about place. For three decades an organisation could hold a mediocre view of place and survive on margins; that grace period has closed. The institutions that came through in shape knew which grid, which port, which regulator, which election. Which brings us to the question this issue is built around: not where the world is going, but where you actually are. The first is a forecast. The second is a matter of record, and few institutions can state theirs precisely.
Founder, Diagelo · Johannesburg · July 2026