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The great tech empires, naturally, are leading the charge. Amazon, with a profligacy that would shame a Roman emperor, intends to spend $200 billion – a mere rounding error in the grand scheme of things, one supposes. Alphabet, not to be outdone, plans to double its capital expenditure. One begins to suspect these titans aren’t building empires, but rather monuments to their own ambition.

Enter Broadcom. They’re not building GPUs, they’re building ASICs – Application-Specific Integrated Circuits. Think of it like this: Nvidia makes a Swiss Army knife. Broadcom makes a really, really good bottle opener. It does one thing, it does it well, and it doesn’t waste space with a toothpick you’ll never use. These ASICs are faster, more efficient, and, crucially, smaller. Space in a data center is expensive, people! It’s not like they’re storing Beanie Babies in there.

You see, these chaps specialize in something called ‘semiconductors’ – tiny, almost invisible things that are the brains of everything from your telephone to the enormous, humming data centers that are popping up like mushrooms after a rain. And these semiconductors have been on a bit of a tear lately, mostly because of this newfangled craze called ‘Artificial Intelligence’ – or AI, as the cool kids call it. It’s all rather complicated, involving mountains of data and machines trying to mimic the human brain, but the gist is this: it needs lots of these semiconductors.