AI & Dividends: A Skeptic’s Portfolio

Alphabet. Google. The company that knows entirely too much about my search history. They’re not flashy, not like some of these other tech darlings. They just… accumulate. Data, profits, a disturbing amount of server farms. And now, apparently, custom chips. My brother, a man who once tried to build a computer out of LEGOs, explained it to me. Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs. Apparently, they’re better than whatever Nvidia is selling, cheaper, more efficient. I mostly nodded and pretended to understand. What I do understand is that if you can build your own chips, you control your costs. And controlled costs translate to better margins, which, in turn, means more money for dividends. Or, you know, stock buybacks. Whatever. The point is, they’re not relying on someone else to provide the essential building blocks. It’s a quiet, almost boring advantage, but those are the best kind. They’ve woven this advantage into everything – search, Chrome, even that unsettling little assistant that lives in my phone. It’s a network effect, they say. I call it creeping surveillance, but either way, it’s working for them. And, hopefully, for me.






