Trump, the man of grand gestures, nudges the oil giants. “Invest,” he says, as if a nation’s troubles can be solved with a ledger sheet. ConocoPhillips, like a cautious wolf, circles the carcass, testing the ground. They speak of preparation, of readiness. A polite dance, this. The oil men are not fools; they’ve seen this play before. They know the cost of a hasty step in a land where promises are brittle things.
Prologis, for the uninitiated, is basically the Amazon of warehouses. Except they don’t deliver your impulse buys, they house the servers that enable those impulse buys. They’ve got a portfolio of buildings so vast, it’s basically its own country. Seriously, 5,900 buildings, 1.3 billion square feet. That’s a lot of square footage. I’m starting to feel claustrophobic just thinking about it. And now, they’re pivoting. Because, surprise, surprise, AI doesn’t run on dreams and venture capital. It runs on power. And space. Lots and lots of space.
First, we have Nvidia (NVDA 0.72%), currently valued at a princely sum of one hundred and ninety dollars per share. This company, it seems, has stumbled upon the modern equivalent of the philosopher’s stone: the graphics processing unit. They claim it powers the artificial intelligence that shall reshape our world. A bold claim, indeed! One might ask, is it genuine progress, or merely a new form of smoke and mirrors? The market, ever susceptible to flattery, has crowned Nvidia the largest company by market capitalization. A fleeting glory, I suspect, built upon the shifting sands of technological hype.
The current generation of cyber-criminals, aided by this…artificial intelligence, are becoming alarmingly efficient. One used to imagine them huddled over keyboards, fuelled by coffee and questionable life choices. Now, it seems, they merely set the machines running and pop out for a spot of tea. Ghastly. And then there’s the looming spectre of quantum computing. A weapon, naturally, in the wrong hands. Though one suspects the truly dangerous ones will be the accountants who master it first.
Optimus. The humanoid robot. It’s supposed to start production this year. Which feels… ambitious. But if it does happen, well, that could change things. It might even justify the current valuation, which, let’s admit, is a bit of a stretch. I’ve been trying to rationalise it, listing pros and cons, but mostly I end up comparing it to the price of avocados. It’s all relative, isn’t it?
Cathie Wood, a lady who knows a thing or two about where the money is going (or, at least, where she thinks it is), predicts that spending on AI infrastructure will balloon from around $500 billion to a rather astonishing $1.4 trillion by 2030. That’s a lot of servers, a lot of power consumption, and a lot of very clever people scratching their heads. What’s particularly interesting is where she sees the spending going. It’s not just about raw computing power, you see. She reckons the growth in networking components – the stuff that actually moves the data – will outpace it, and that these specialized AI chips, known as ASICs, will start to eat into the market share of those familiar graphics processing units (GPUs) everyone’s been hearing about. It’s like a digital game of chess, only with billions of dollars at stake.
Alas, poor Stellar (XLM), how far thou hast fallen! A decline of 2.11% since yesternight, and a staggering 16.6% over the past week. One might say it’s less a market correction and more a dramatic exit from a third-rate vaudeville act.
That leaves Advanced Micro Devices, AMD, slithering in the undergrowth. For years, they were the scrappy underdog, the company perpetually “about to” make a move. A lot of hot air and broken promises. But something’s shifted. The air smells different. I’ve been watching this play out for a long time, and I’m starting to think this isn’t just incremental progress. This is… a metamorphosis. They’re not just building chips anymore; they’re building an alternative. A goddamn REBELLION.
The reasons for this descent are, naturally, complicated. One suspects the hand of fate, or perhaps a particularly mischievous imp residing within the Federal Reserve’s vaults. But the official explanations involve policies emanating from the White House – pronouncements about Greenland, threats whispered like curses, and a fondness for tax cuts that appear to have been conceived in a fever dream. These policies, you see, frighten capital. It scurries away, seeking refuge in things solid and unchanging, like gold – a metal burdened with the weight of centuries and the anxieties of kings. And so, the dollar weakens, a slow leak in the treasury’s hull.
We shall now consider two such specimens, firms that have performed rather handsomely of late and, dare one say, might continue to do so. It’s not a guarantee, mind you; the stock market is a fickle mistress, prone to whims and sudden changes of heart. But they seem, at the moment, to be on rather solid footing.