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SoundHound, it appears, is attempting to build a business on the premise that people will willingly converse with machines. A charming notion, perhaps, but one which relies heavily on the assumption that these machines will, in fact, be able to understand them. Their focus is, ostensibly, on consumer-facing applications – ordering meals, arranging travel – the sort of tasks one might delegate to a particularly efficient, if somewhat impertinent, secretary. Navitas, by contrast, manufactures the silicon required to keep the data centres humming – the unglamorous, but essential, infrastructure upon which this digital fantasy is built.

The S&P 500, that grand, lumbering index, experiences such hiccups with regularity – about once every four years, a gentle reminder that even empires crumble, if only momentarily. But Axon, for nearly a decade, seemed immune. It expanded, naturally, beyond the simple TASER, branching into the realm of body cameras, dashboard cameras, and the management of evidence – a veritable panopticon for the modern age. A surge, a veritable blossoming of stock value, occurred – a 3,340% increase over the period from 2015 to 2024. One suspects a clerical error, perhaps a rogue decimal point, but the numbers, alas, hold firm.

They call it Wall Street’s most hated stock. Which, honestly, sounds like a perfectly good reason to take a closer look. Of the analysts offering opinions – and people are always offering opinions – only 23% suggest buying it. The other 77%? They’ve moved on to less troublesome investments, like beanie babies or hope.

A few years ago, the merits of either stock rested on rather more terrestrial concerns. Now, however, both enterprises present themselves as pioneers of a digital future, a future which, one suspects, may arrive considerably later than advertised. Tesla, naturally, proposes to unleash a fleet of driverless vehicles, a vision of automated convenience. Meta, meanwhile, aspires to something grander, a ‘superintelligence’ – a phrase which, in the current climate, evokes less scientific optimism than existential dread.

Dogecoin and Shiba Inu, those digital embodiments of internet whimsy, have fared particularly poorly. They declined by 61% and 66% respectively in 2025. But those numbers, while alarming to anyone who invested their life savings, are merely previews of a more substantial gravitational pull downwards. They’re also, if we’re being honest, rather predictable. (Predictability, of course, is a relative term. Predicting the weather next Tuesday is far more reliable than predicting the future of a digital asset based on a meme.)

A mere forty-one gold dragons² invested at the Initial Public Offering – a quaint ritual involving much shouting and the waving of parchment – would now purchase a small kingdom. Or, failing that, a very comfortable townhouse. The question isn’t whether Amazon has made millionaires; it’s whether it continues to be a reliable path to such a state. A path, let’s be honest, increasingly crowded with hopefuls and slightly desperate hedge fund managers.

For five years, the S&P 500, that behemoth of established fortunes, has held sway. And, of course, the recent delirium over artificial intelligence has disproportionately benefited its most celebrated denizens. But the market, like a capricious lepidopterist, often shifts its affections. And the Russell 2000, after a promising start, appears poised to, shall we say, inconvenience the larger index. Two reasons, delicately interwoven, suggest this is more than mere happenstance.

The truth of it, as near as I can figure, ain’t so much about this one chip itself. It’s more about a trend, a notion that these big cloud fellas – Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet – are gettin’ the itch to build their own contraptions. They’ve got pockets deep enough to do it, and a powerful incentive to avoid payin’ Nvidia’s prices. The question ain’t whether Nvidia can still build a fine machine, but whether they can keep hold of a good share of the spendin’ as these cloud providers start makin’ their own parts.