Locator: 49417AI.
Personal. For the archives. For the extended family. Not meant for the general audience. See disclaimer for the blog.
AI prompt:
AI. Large data centers. Chips. This is just meaningless random chatter but .... well here goes.
Going from "large data centers" to "AI factories" is a huge, huge, huge jump in the "cloud" story.
The mainstream media is still trying to get their heads around all of this.
Investors seem fixated on semiconductor chips because it's impossible to keep up with large data centers, who's building them, who the subcontractors are providing all the support for CoreWeave, AWS, FluidStack, Fairwater, etc.
But all the talk about semiconductors (Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Micron, etc) has almost become a sideshow -- important for those involved with that industry but in the big scheme of things, a sideshow. The real show now: large data centers and an even bigger show -- the main event, as it were -- AI factories.
Which brings me to this. A tale of two companies: Intel and Cisco. For investors, both have been somewhat of a disappointment. Coming out of the dot-com craze, Cisco was fortunate to come out of it alive, but for the past 20 years, Cisco has sort of just "been there." Holding on, doing important things, but not much for investors.
For Intel, it's been even worse. We've (you and I) talked about how it happened, doesn't matter now, but Intel went from the biggest US semiconductor company to barely hanging on. But unlike Intel, Cisco made no fatal mistakes.
Cisco simply did what it did. Infrastructure. Networking. Wiring. And then, through no luck of its own, except hanging around, what pops up? Large data centers, AI factories.
Quick: name the one infrastructure company / the one subcontractor best positioned for this fourth industrial revolution? Cisco.
Some old-school investors -- like my dad, in his 90's bought Cisco during the dot-com craze and not knowing what was going on kept his Cisco even though its share price plummeted. Dad simply was glacial in acting and never got around to selling Cisco. And now Cisco is in the cat-bird's seat.
Meanwhile, the semiconductor companies are in a circular firing squad -- some with real bullets (Nvidia and AMD, for example); some with blanks (Intel?), but it's basically a shoot-out among Intel-Nvidia-AMD for GPUs/CPUs and Intel looks like the weakest link at the moment. Those old-school investors who held Cisco for lack of understanding what was even going on seemed to have lucked out. I'm going to sit back, have a Coke and listen to your thoughts.
ChatGPT: several pages. Whoo-hoo! It's going to be a long, productive evening. Hey, speaking of which, Amazon Prime Thursday night football.
Fastest way to see if one's on the right track? Run it past ChatGPT.
Second fastest way to see if one's on the right track? Follow the money.
This was apparently a bad day on the market; I don't know. I missed it, except for checking these two tickers now:
Tickers:
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A Musical Interlude
Seven minutes, five seconds long.
