Before The Stack: Missing Step 0 in Compute Governance

Global compute infrastructure is structurally concentrated. Three firms account for roughly two-thirds of cloud infrastructure revenue, frontier AI hardware is supplied by a single dominant firm, and the minerals on which this infrastructure depends are disproportionately sourced from southern and central Africa. South Africa and Zambia occupy critical positions in that upstream supply chain, contributing cobalt, copper, manganese, and platinum-group metals to global AI hardware production. South African mineral law, built around the doctrine of public custodianship established in the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act 28 of 2002 and affirmed by the Constitutional Court in Agri South Africa v Minister of Minerals and Energy, has developed a sophisticated framework for governing strategic resources under conditions of market concentration. Zambian licensing practice offers a complementary model of developmental conditionality. Yet neither state exercises any governance authority over the compute infrastructure those minerals physically enable. This paper names that governance gap the Missing Step 0: the discontinuity between extractive regulation, where South African and Zambian law has developed mature custodianship frameworks, and compute infrastructure governance, where both states remain regulatory Protocol on Digital Trade, which was adopted in February 2024 but is not yet in force across all member states, and addresses the structural constraints on collective African bargaining with hyperscaler infrastructure providers. The argument is bounded and does not claim that African mineral leverage is absolute, that current South African law unambiguously authorises the full CPPP regime, or that CPPPs constitute an imminent challenge to hyperscaler dominance at the frontier of AI development. CPPPs are presented as analytically serious, normatively grounded, legally contestable but plausible, and most credible as a phased institutional project.