Decade after decade of widely available computing power has triggered significant industry disruptions and an unprecedented technology boom—and has transformed the global economy in the process.

The high-frequency trading firm Citadel Securities, for example, began embedding advanced computing capabilities into its core strategy in the early 2000s, and in turn was able to leverage immense processing power and technologies, such as machine learning, to execute trades in microseconds. Citadel’s ability to rapidly put large amounts of computing power to use have made it the largest retail market-making firm in the U.S., executing over $400 billion in trades per day.

The innovations made possible by unconstrained computing power have only expanded with the development of AI. Yet for many, there appears to be a paradox looming, based on the projection that because frontier AI models are so computationally intensive to train and use, their proliferation could lead to a scarcity of computing power.

To test the likelihood of this scenario, the BCG Henderson Institute and Exponential View teamed up to quantitatively model future supply of and demand for computing power. Our model incorporated moderate assumptions about future supply, while using bullish demand estimates. What we discovered was that the abundance of computing power is likely to continue even in an aggressive scenario of rapid generative AI adoption.

While tech CEOs have gotten this message and have geared up to leverage the continued availability of affordable computing power, many business leaders have not fully digested the potential reach of this reality in conjunction with the transformative possibilities of AI—even though it could have a significant impact on how companies of all stripes organize and operate. Viewing change as incremental, rather than exponential, is a common mistake that Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft’s first-ever chief technology officer, observed as far back as 1993, writing at the time that most executives “act like linear extrapolators that won’t know what hit them.”

For executives seeking to avoid being blindsided by an exponential wave of change brought on by teaming AI with expansive computing power, now is the time to reflect on the implications. In what novel ways might leaders create, deliver, and capture value enabled by orders-of-magnitude more computing power? Having an answer to that question as AI and abundant compute power continue to feed off each other will be key to staying at the forefront of innovation and competition.