Selling Shovels in a Digital Gold Rush
Let’s be honest, trying to pick the winning AI software company right now feels a bit like betting on a single horse in a 50 runner race. It’s chaotic, unpredictable, and you’re more likely to lose your shirt than strike it rich. A far more pragmatic approach, I’ve always thought, is to follow the old gold rush adage. Don’t dig for gold, sell the picks and shovels.
When a giant like SoftBank injects billions into the AI ecosystem, that money has to go somewhere tangible first. Before a single line of revolutionary code can be written, someone needs to buy the hardware. We’re talking about the specialised semiconductors, the high performance processors, and the sprawling data centre infrastructure that form the physical backbone of AI. Companies like NVIDIA have already shown us how this plays out. Their chips became the must have tool for AI development, and their stock price reflected that quite handsomely. But they are not the only shovel maker in town.