AI is turning technology back into a hard-asset business. Power, chips, memory and financing, increasingly shaped by lawmakers, decide who can deliver AI capacity. Geopolitics decides who gets to use it: in June 2026, US export controls took Anthropic's Fable and Mythos models offline worldwide. And the rules themselves are contested: in September, after a researcher's resignation reopened the extinction debate, Anthropic and OpenAI called for a coordinated slowdown, while Nvidia's Jensen Huang dismissed safety as an engineering problem needing no new laws. Michiel van Vliet examines Microsoft's strategy, its changing role in the ecosystem, how it compares with the competition, and what this means for partners and their customers. The message for partner CEOs is to understand the geopolitics, Microsoft and the competition, and then build their own strategy, not Microsoft's.