The AI Gold Rush: Why I'm Watching the Shovel Sellers
Let’s be honest, the constant chatter about artificial intelligence is becoming a bit much. Every day brings a new miraculous chatbot or a company claiming AI will revolutionise how we toast bread. It’s a dizzying, noisy spectacle. But when the dust settles, I think the lasting fortunes might not be made by the loudest evangelists, but by the quiet engineers in cleanrooms building the things that make it all possible.
The entire AI revolution, you see, has hit a rather inconvenient physical wall. It’s not a lack of clever software, it’s a shortage of memory. Not the stuff in your laptop, but a hyper-specialised component called high-bandwidth memory, or HBM. This is the stuff that shovels data into AI processors at frankly terrifying speeds. Without it, your favourite AI is just a sleepy calculator.