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Behold, Applied Digital, a company that fancies itself a proprietor of purpose-built digital estates. They are, at present, transitioning from the laborious task of erecting these structures to the more agreeable one of extracting rents therefrom. Their Polaris Forge 1, a campus of considerable ambition, hath begun to yield fruit – or, rather, electricity bills. The first hundred megawatts are now operational, a milestone celebrated with, one suspects, a considerable expenditure of champagne.

Palantir, you see, is in the business of rather clever data integration and analytics platforms. They’ve also concocted some adjacent AI software, allowing developers to build large language models into workflows and applications. What sets them apart, however, is their deployment of forward engineers – bright chaps who descend upon clients and build custom applications atop their core platforms. A dashedly clever idea, what!

I’ve been looking at the numbers, trying to make sense of it all. It’s a bit like trying to decipher my own dating history – lots of activity, not always a clear path forward. Anyway, the Q4 earnings were…fine. Actually, better than fine. They were…robust. Which is a word I don’t use often, mostly because it makes me think of Victorian novels.

So, you’ve got five hundred bucks burning a hole in your pocket? You’re thinking Rigetti? Hold your horses! Before you go all-in on something that makes a Rubik’s Cube look simple, let’s have a little chat. Is this a chance to buy the dip, or are we watching a beautiful, expensive balloon deflate?

The recent 11% decline in Alphabet’s share price, since early February, has elicited the usual chorus of pronouncements. That it has made no substantial progress since late November is, to some, evidence of a deeper malaise. Such reactions are, often, more indicative of short-term sentiment than long-term value. A closer examination reveals a company performing, if not spectacularly, then consistently well, amidst a climate of undue pessimism surrounding technology stocks.

But let’s talk about Berkshire Hathaway [BRKA +0.25%] [BRKB 0.51%]. Yes, that Berkshire. The one Warren Buffett built. Sixty-odd years he spent tinkering with this company. Sixty years! That’s enough time to learn the banjo, become a master cheese sculptor, and still have time to run a moderately successful haberdashery. And now you want a piece of it? Well, good luck with that. They’re selling shares for…get this…$750,000 a pop! Oy vey! Don’t worry, though. They also have some cheaper ones, at a mere $500. It’s like buying a Yugo versus a Rolls Royce, only both are painted beige and driven by accountants.

The question, naturally, is whether one has missed the boat. A perfectly valid concern, though one rarely finds a truly satisfactory answer. However, even at its current valuation, Micron isn’t quite demanding a king’s ransom. Not yet, anyway.

The past year wasn’t merely about a pleasing tick on the earnings report, nor even about admittance to the S&P 500, that grand, yet oddly silent, society. It revealed, in a rather haphazard fashion, the outline of a long-term strategy, extending far beyond the simple transaction of shares. A strategy, I suspect, sketched on a napkin during a particularly restless night.