Will access to AI compute become a real competitive advantage for startups?

Lately I’ve been thinking about how AI infrastructure spending is starting to feel less like normal cloud usage and like long-term capital investment (similar to energy or telecom sectors). Big tech companies are already locking in massive compute capacity to AI agents and large-scale inference workloads. If this trend continues, just having reliable access to compute could become a serious competitive advantage not just a backend technical detail. It also makes me wonder if startup funding dynamics could change.