Before the First World War, the British Royal Navy ran on coal.

Coal shaped everything: ship design, logistics, and imperial reach.

Britain had coal ports across the globe, miners at home, and an industrial system built to feed furnaces without pause.

The Navy planned around coal. It ruled the seas on coal’s schedule.

As ships grew faster and warfare more technical, coal’s limits became harder to ignore.

It burned dirty. It constrained range. It forced ships to stop and refuel, leaving a visible signature on the horizon. What once felt sufficient began to feel exposed.

Oil changed the equation.

Oil-powered ships moved faster, traveled farther, required fewer crew, and revealed less of themselves in motion. In naval combat, those advantages outweighed habit and tradition.

The Admiralty—the department responsible for command, administration, and policy of the Royal Navy—chose oil.

That decision carried a cost. Britain had almost no oil.

Oil came from exotic lands with unstable politics and private operators. The Navy could command fleets and sea lanes, but it could not command the ground oil came from.

Churchill saw the risk immediately.

Sea power would now depend on fuel security beyond Britain’s borders.

So in 1914, the British government quietly bought a controlling stake in a small, private oil company operating in Persia.

The firm? The Anglo-Persian Oil Company.

History would later know it as BP…

Of course, no one spoke of energy empires at the time. There were no headlines about transformation. Just a recognition that the world had chosen a new fuel—and power would follow it.

Recently, the Paradigm team uncovered an eerily similar thing shaping up in the AI market.

Nvidia’s “Anglo-Persian”

Right now, by and large, the public conversation still revolves around models, chips, and benchmarks. Faster training runs. Bigger data centers.

Some of it is signal. Most of it? Noise.

Underneath all of it, institutions are quietly solving the biggest problem. Custody. Control. Dependency management.

The real bottleneck.

It’s the same thing every major power faced a century ago: fuel security once a new power source becomes unavoidable.

In AI, the “fuel” is reliable, sovereign-accessible compute—the ability to run advanced systems continuously, under constraint, without depending on someone else’s priorities.

Right now, one small company is positioning itself to be the “BP for AI”... and big powers—Nvidia and the CIA included—are catching bids before the public even realizes what’s happening.

It’s not sexy. But most critical things aren’t. And the unsexy bits are often the ones that get ignored… until it’s too late.

One Backdoor Way to Play it

What mattered in 1914 was the realization that innovation was outgrowing control.

And once the Admiralty committed to oil, Britain’s naval superiority no longer depended on shipbuilding alone. It depended on access. On reliability. On a layer beneath the ships that the Navy could not manufacture for itself.

That recognition forced a change in behavior.

But instead of trying to own everything outright, Britain bought a stake in the one company sitting at the point of dependency. Quietly. Early. Before anyone understood why it mattered.

As mentioned, that same shift is happening now.

And though this company is private (meaning, most are locked out), Paradigm has uncovered a “backdoor” way to invest. 

Today, as an Altucher Confidential reader, you’re going to get access to all of this information in James’ latest presentation.

No subscription. No paywall. The actual ticker you can buy tomorrow morning with as little as $500.

You’ll also see the “smoking gun” proof this pre-IPO opportunity is as big as it sounds.

The catch? You have to check it out before January 5, 2026. Because that’s when things kick off for this under-the-radar company.

Click here for the full presentation