Markets without masters

For most of the twentieth century, capitalism rested on a simple institutional arrangement: governments governed, corporations produced, and markets mediated between them. That architecture is now undergoing a structural mutation. Multinational corporations increasingly control the systems through which modern societies operate—data networks, cloud infrastructure, global supply chains, financial platforms, and artificial intelligence compute capacity. The question today is no longer whether corporations influence public policy. The more unsettling question is whether they are gradually becoming parallel governing institutions within the global political economy.

The scale of corporate power today increasingly rivals the economic sovereignty of nation-states. According to recent Forbes Global 2000 data, the world’s largest public companies collectively generate nearly $53 trillion in annual revenue and control over $242 trillion in assets—figures that reflect a massive concentration of global economic influence.

The financial sector best illustrates this transformation. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, saw its assets under management (AUM) surge to a record $14 trillion in early 2026. To put this in perspective, this single private entity now oversees capital significantly larger than the combined annual GDPs of Germany ($4.7 trillion), India ($4.3 trillion), and Japan ($4.2 trillion)—the world’s third, fourth, and fifth largest economies. In terms of financial scale, BlackRock is now trailed only by the national outputs of the United States and China.

Institutions of this magnitude influence bond markets, pension systems, sovereign debt, and climate investment flows—functions historically associated with public financial authorities. In practical terms, financial markets increasingly function as algorithmically managed governance systems, with private capital managers exerting influence over macroeconomic trajectories.

If financial capital has become transnational, digital infrastructure has become the new terrain of sovereignty. The most critical infrastructure of the twenty-first century—cloud computing, AI compute clusters, and data centers—is largely built and operated by corporations. Technology companies now dominate global market capitalization rankings; Nvidia, for instance, briefly surpassed $4 trillion in market value in 2025, symbolizing how artificial intelligence has transformed corporate power into geopolitical leverage. The AI economy is built upon a highly concentrated stack: semiconductors, training datasets, hyperscale data centers, and cloud platforms controlled by a handful of companies. When governments rely on these infrastructures for everything from digital services to defense computing, the boundary between corporate infrastructure and public governance begins to blur.

This concentration of technological capacity is reinforced by the logic of surveillance capitalism, where data extraction becomes the central economic resource of the digital age. Empirical studies of web tracking show that a small cluster of technology firms—Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft—dominate the architecture through which data is collected, processed, and monetized across the internet. Data, once treated as an informational by-product of economic activity, has become a strategic asset comparable to oil in the twentieth century. Corporations that control digital platforms therefore control the informational environment through which societies communicate, trade, and form political opinions.

Artificial intelligence is accelerating this transformation. Training frontier AI systems requires enormous computing infrastructure and massive datasets, creating barriers to entry that only a few corporations can overcome. As AI becomes embedded in finance, healthcare, logistics, and governance systems, the companies controlling AI models and cloud infrastructure acquire influence not merely over markets but over decision-making architectures themselves. Governments increasingly rely on private AI systems for analytics, public services, and security operations. This reliance creates a subtle inversion of power: states regulate technology firms, yet their own operational capacity increasingly depends on those same firms.

Global supply chains further reinforce the quasi-governmental role of corporations. Modern production networks span dozens of countries and thousands of suppliers, coordinated by multinational firms that determine where capital, employment, and industrial capacity flow. Apple’s manufacturing ecosystem, for example, influences industrial policy across Asia, while semiconductor supply chains now shape geopolitical strategies in the United States, China, Taiwan, and Europe. Corporate supply chains have effectively become transnational governance structures, determining the distribution of economic opportunity across the global economy.
India provides one of the most interesting counter-experiments to this emerging corporate order. Rather than allowing private platforms to dominate digital infrastructure entirely, India has built one of the world’s most ambitious systems of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI). The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) serves as a global benchmark for digital public infrastructure, processing more than 20 billion transactions every month and accounting for roughly 84% of India’s digital retail payments. In February 2026 alone, the platform processed 20.39 billion transactions, with daily usage peaking at several hundred million. This scale confirms UPI as one of the largest and most efficient financial architectures ever built, successfully transitioning a cash-heavy economy into a world leader in real-time digital settlements. This digital payment ecosystem has transformed India’s financial landscape, integrating millions of small businesses and informal workers into formal financial networks.

The Indian state is now attempting to extend this public infrastructure model into other domains of economic governance. The government has announced BharatTradeNet, a national digital platform designed to unify international trade documentation, logistics, and financing into a single digital system. Meanwhile, India’s AI ecosystem employs over six million people, with policy initiatives such as IndiaAI and indigenous models like BharatGen seeking to ensure technological sovereignty in the AI era. These initiatives reflect an attempt to create a hybrid governance model in which the state provides foundational digital infrastructure while private companies innovate on top of it.

Yet even India’s model reveals the deep entanglement between state capacity and corporate ecosystems. Digital payment platforms such as PhonePe and Google Pay process a large share of UPI transactions, while technology giants continue to invest heavily in India’s digital infrastructure. The anticipated PhonePe IPO—targeting a valuation of up to $10.5 billion in early 2026—illustrates how private platforms continue to dominate user interfaces even within publicly built infrastructure. Despite the state-supported nature of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), PhonePe currently facilitates nearly half of all transactions on the network. This dominance allows private entities to leverage public digital goods as a foundation for massive private ecosystems in lending and insurance, highlighting the complex marriage between state innovation and corporate scale. This dynamic suggests that the future of governance may not be purely corporate or purely governmental but a layered system in which public infrastructure and private platforms coexist in uneasy equilibrium.

The deeper transformation, however, lies in how rules are now written and enforced in the digital economy. Platform companies govern speech through content moderation algorithms, shape commerce through app-store policies, and determine the visibility of information through recommendation systems. These decisions affect billions of users and often have greater immediate impact than formal legislation. When platforms control both the infrastructure and the rules of participation, they begin to resemble digital sovereigns rather than conventional corporations.

What is emerging, therefore, is not the disappearance of capitalism but its structural evolution. Traditional capitalism assumed a hierarchy in which sovereign states regulated markets populated by competing firms. The new system increasingly resembles a networked order where a small number of corporate ecosystems control the infrastructure upon which markets—and even governments—operate. Financial capital, data networks, AI infrastructure, and supply chains are no longer merely economic assets; they are instruments of governance.

In that sense, the central political question of the twenty-first century may no longer be ideological. It is institutional. The real debate is not capitalism versus socialism, but state sovereignty versus corporate sovereignty. If the twentieth century was defined by the rise of nation-states, the twenty-first may be defined by the emergence of corporations that operate at a scale, complexity, and infrastructural depth that increasingly rivals them.
The future of governance will likely depend on whether states can redesign public institutions for the digital age—or whether the operating systems of the global economy will continue to migrate quietly from parliaments to platforms.

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