Transcription
Back in early 2020, most people thought COVID was just another headline. It felt far away. It felt contained, and it felt like something that was just happening somewhere else in the world where it wouldn't impact us. But then a small group of people started moving differently. They were stocking up early. They started to be aware that a radical shift could happen. And for a little while, they looked crazy. But it was about a few weeks later when the entire world had then changed.
Now, ladies and gents, I believe we are going through one of those moments again right now. Only this time, it's not a virus, but instead, it's artificial intelligence. At the time of filming this video, I feel like a lot of people still do not understand how big of a shift this is going to be. Outside of my own network, if you ask just most people who aren't really tapped into markets, they'll tell you that AI is cool. It's still like a fun little tool. Maybe it's something that helps you a lot with writing your emails or telling your boss that you don't want to come into work that day. Or it can help you to figure out what that mysterious bug or bird on your property is.
Now, I hate that I have to state the obvious here, but y'all should know at this point AI is much more than that. AI is a technological shift that is going to reshape the way that people work, the way companies operate, the way money flows. And I believe AI is going to change the way that wealth gets created over the next decade.
Now, the good news here is that with most people still asleep, still underestimating this, or claiming that AI is a bubble, this opens up a massive window for you to make money on. I believe we're going through that early phase where people paying attention now can position themselves before this becomes even more obvious to the rest of the world. Now, by the end of this video, you're going to have a full understanding on the best sectors, companies, and themes that you can get exposure to right now while this thesis plays out.
Now, before we get there, let's talk about the core fundamental truths and what the data is telling us about how real all of this is. So, just a few months ago, back in February of this year, roughly $285 billion in SaaS market value got wiped out in 48 hours. The S&P North American Software Index had its worst month ever since October 2008. Hedge funds, who are actually shorting software stocks, made over $24 billion. Salesforce, one of the leaders in the SaaS industry, lost about 26% of its market cap. Adobe fell 19%. Atlassian dropped 30%. And there were even more companies that took a massive hit.
So, this year wasn't just a random event or another pullback. This was actually a realization of something more important. It was back in February where we had some of the biggest updates that we've ever gotten in the history of AI. This was when we got AI agents. This is when we started to get the Claude Opus update, and people like you and I started to realize that AI is much further developed and sophisticated and that it could actually start doing a lot more work than we initially thought. Since then, AI agents have been able to do proper legal document review. We've seen financial analysts being created from AI. Customer support that never gets tired, distracted, or hungry.
So, when AI and AI agents can start doing work even better than humans, more consistently, and even faster, then investors, especially the folks over at Wall Street, start asking the obvious question. If one AI agent can do the work of multiple employees, why are companies going to keep paying for all of these seats?
So, this is where things get really interesting. There are going to be a ton of different ways that you can make money with this whole explosion of the AI market. The CEO of Anthropic has publicly said AI could eliminate up to 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within 1 to 5 years. Back a few months ago, Catrini Research released a whole article called the 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis. This article gave a hypothetical scenario detailing a 2028 economic collapse driven by AI agent adoption. Now, Catrini Research is just an independent research firm based in New York, founded just a few years ago. Now, this firm has been doing a great job the last few years. They've been nailing their trades. They've been investing into the right places, and a lot of those narratives have been playing out with that credibility and how well-written their research report was. The day this was released got massive media attention and ended up tanking a lot of the market.
On one hand, you have smart money positioning themselves hard for all the upcoming change. And on the other hand, you still have people who have not had that whole AI breakthrough moment yet. There are even companies training humanoid robots by having them learn how to move like humans, how to do chores, how to fold clothes, and eventually how humans are going to interact with robots in the physical world. Growing up, we used to watch like Terminator, I, Robot, all these movies. Most of us dismiss that saying, you know, it's not going to happen in our lifetime. But I assure you, companies right now are building towards this, and this future is closer than most realize.
How do you then position yourself? What can you do in order to make sure that AI doesn't replace you and that you're able to make money from all the changes that are coming up? So, first of all, no matter what industry you're in, even if you're in government jobs and you say AI is never going to come for my job because the government is never going to let AI touch all this sensitive data, don't take the chance. Whether you're an employee or a business owner, just continue to use AI every day. This doesn't mean that you just like pop open ChatGPT and you're just having a therapeutic conversation with it. I'm talking about opening up different apps, new tools, buying software, testing things out, creating videos, creating images, using agents, trying out co-work. If you really want to be ahead of this wave so that it does not replace you, you have to be constantly using AI, get good at prompting, getting comfortable at it, and realize that from this point, when this video is uploaded, AI is only going to get smarter from here.
So, my rule is always the 1% rule. This is something that I've encountered in my own life from the very moment I started this YouTube channel to when I've gone from zero to making multiple seven-figure businesses. This is just be in the direction 1%. Because that compounds an incredible amount towards the end of this year. Look, ChatGPT went from 0 to 800 million weekly active users in a little over 2 years. It hit 100 million users in just 60 days, which is faster than any social media like TikTok, Instagram. And this means that a lot of people are using it. So, you have to continue to redefine your edge. I remember for a while I was scared of using AI in anything. I even told my team, "If anyone gets caught using AI, we're done." All right, I, I'm not going to read it. A lot of it is sloppy. So, just don't dismiss this whole change. Make sure that you continue to utilize AI in your daily workflow.
At the same time, there are going to be some rare industries where AI is not going to be able to replace your job. In healthcare, some creative kind of work. Even for now, anything high security, I don't think AI is going to touch for a while. But you never want to say never because AI can even come for my job, guys. So that's why I'm using AI as much as I can in order to stay above the wave.
The next thing that you can do in order to gain exposure and upside to this space is by either building or investing. I encourage all of my viewers to build something. It's not hard anymore. If you have any small little app idea, you could launch that. Clog Code does a great job in putting that together. You just have to give it the concept, the idea, and then you just mess around with it from there.
Now, the investing side though, this is where things can get juicy. So, the Mag 7, also known as the Magnificent 7, which refers to the group of seven most dominant, high-performing US tech stocks, are expected to spend over $680 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026 alone. That is roughly 70% more than the year before. Now, the broader buildout is going towards data center infrastructure by 2030, which is being measured in the trillions of dollars.
So, why are some of the biggest tech companies deploying so much money into data centers and putting all their resources, all their eggs in baskets there? Well, I've already seen AI getting pretty well integrated in most of the big apps. But keep in mind, every AI agent, every model, every application, every assistant, all will need some kind of physical infrastructure to run on. AI demands a lot of power. If you don't have the infrastructure for that power, by the time the tech rolls around, you are going to be left behind. That's why companies are preparing ahead. They're buying up servers, chips, memory, electricity.
So when people ask, "All right, then where's the opportunity? What's like the next Nvidia? What do I just full pour all my money into?" The answer is usually, first, you got to start understanding what AI is going to need. That way, you build conviction before you just decide to invest in anything. This is also just a reminder that there's going to be a lot of plays. You don't want to just full pour and do one thing. Chances are, if you're tunnel-visioned on even just one company, you're unable to do research further. You're not going to be able to see the other companies that are going to give you even more upside.
So let's talk about those companies. One of those is going to be Tesla. Tesla is still more interesting in this whole AI narrative because people still associate it as a car company. Now, the underlying story here is that Tesla for years now have been working towards being a robotics company instead of what we know them as, just an electric car company. It was announced earlier this year that Elon would even stop producing its S and X models as it shifts towards making more robots. Some of you guys might have seen some Instagram reels or videos on the Tesla Optimus robot. I mean, when looking at this, I really think it's just so far distant in the future, but the reality of this coming to life and being sold to consumers is getting closer by the day. On top of that, Tesla's also investing into the robo-taxi angle, which alone makes a massive part of the bull case. Some projections point to the global robo-taxi market eventually being worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually. If you happen to live on the West Coast or even San Francisco, you're already seeing some of these robo-taxis like Waymo driving around. Tesla already has millions of vehicles on the road collecting real-world driving data. They have in-house AI training capability, and they have the ability to scale manufacturing.
Now, although this sounds like the most obvious play for you to get some kind of AI exposure, all of this still does not guarantee success. This is not going to make you into a 100 billionaire by investing into Tesla in 2026. Now, since the start of this year, Tesla's actually down about 15%. Since they've IPOed, though, they're up 29,000%, and in the last 1 to 5 years, gains haven't been all that crazy. 68% gains in the last 5 years and 43% gains in the last 1 year. Keep in mind, Tesla still has a market cap over $1.17 trillion. And at the end of the day, with all the things that Elon said he's building, it's really still just all talk. Despite that, Elon is still one of the most successful entrepreneurs of our generation, and I would not bet against him.
The next play that you should be on the lookout for is Amazon. Now, if you tell anyone that Amazon seems to be an undervalued play, they're probably going to laugh in your face. And look, I don't blame them. It's a stock that has $2.25 trillion in market cap. Guys, that is basically the entire crypto market cap today. So, here's the thing. Whenever we're talking about these $1 to $2 trillion market cap companies, you're not going to expect to make life-changing money fast. Investing at the end of the day is simply just risk and reward. You invest into a broader, bigger, more established company, there's going to be less upside, but you're not going to experience the massive crash or I would be very surprised, anything could happen, that a company still like this would even go to zero. But in terms of portfolio diversity, these are still asymmetric plays on a higher scale.
So why is Amazon on this list? Well, a lot of people still believe Amazon is just an e-commerce company where you just buy something and it gets delivered to you next day. But Amazon has a massive business under AWS, which is still one of the biggest backbones of the entire internet. One time we had an AWS outage earlier this year, pretty much nothing was usable on the internet because how many providers use Amazon now for their back-end system. Now Amazon is basically using the whole AWS infrastructure advantage to position themselves for the AI wave. They have services like Bedrock and their broader AI factory to make it easier for companies and even governments to deploy models and workloads without building anything from scratch. You combine that with some of these other side projects that they've been taking on. An example is Amazon has a custom AI chip called Tranium. These are supposed to be cheaper than a lot of the top-end GPUs that everyone is fighting for right now, and Amazon just said, "Screw, we're just going to make our own." Amazon's retail business has already done more than $600 billion in revenue, but it runs on small margins. With AI, if they get even a 1% improvement in their margins, whether it's from more efficiency or robots automating the shipping and logistics process or even customer support, this would translate into an additional billions of dollars in extra profit for shareholders. Then you layer in their robotics, their footprint, their fulfillment data, and suddenly you now have a company that has multiple different exposure points to the entire AI theme. To me, Amazon is still one of those companies where people may be underestimating just how many ways that they can win.
The next company here is going to be Meta. Meta is interesting because unlike a lot of companies spending aggressively on AI, they are already showing actual monetization. Now, this here matters especially for the stock market because companies are based off of their profits, their performance every quarter. When it comes to Meta, their AI-powered ad recommendation system helped drive roughly a 3.5% increase in ad clicks on Facebook. Now, that really does sound like small numbers, but you just have to put everything into scale. Small numbers like that for Meta turns into massive revenue gains over time. And that's really the whole point with some of the Magnificent 7 or the biggest tech companies in the world. They're not here looking for that massive ultra home run. They're just looking to improve margins a small bit. Because if they can do that, they add in tens of billions of dollars in extra revenue, and that translates into more upside for the stock where people like you and I who are investing into these companies are able to reap the upside.
Look, you know, whenever there's an earnings call every quarter and based on the earnings call, if they were profitable or they missed their earnings, the stock prices of those companies go down or up. Well, this is because the stock market cannot look years ahead into the future. This is what investors are doing to position themselves. Markets react based on per quarter. If capex is investing into buildings and data centers and all this tech that's going to play out 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 years from now, that discrepancy, that's the trade. So, Amazon, Meta, and a lot of these companies, they're spending an enormous amount on capex. This is where, as an investor, you need conviction to hold through this type of upside.
Now, as this year progresses, I do think we're just going to continue to see volatility. It's very hard to time the market for anyone. The best thing you can do is just ask yourself, how long do I want to stay invested for? If you're investing for the next 10, 20 years, just ask yourself even a simple framework question like, look, if I had a kid today, what stock would he hold when he's an adult 20 years from now? Whatever comes to mind is going to be one of those stocks on your list.
Now, on this channel, we've talked a lot about short-term investing, asymmetric momentum investing, even trading, but these kind of plays are really just focused for long-term value. I know it's not the prettiest or the most attractive, but it is long-term patience like this where oftentimes you can outperform someone who's desperately trying to make every trade work.
Underneath the massive mega caps, let's talk about the picks and shovels for this year. So, your picks and shovels are similar to what you saw back in the California Gold Rush. You could either run to the gold, try to pick up those little specks, or you could be the guy selling the shovel outside the tunnel so that people who are digging up for the gold, they have a tool that they can use. But here's the thing, the guy digging for gold could miss the gold. He could just be super unlucky and never find a nugget. The guy selling the shovels, he's constantly going to make money. This is how I think about a lot of the entire AI infrastructure.
Look, as much as you and I want to think we're smart, at the end of the day, we don't have 100% certainty on which applications are going to win, especially the ones that are not on the top seven. I don't know which language model is going to be predominantly used. I don't know which data center is going to be the most used. I don't know which AI assistant is going to be the one that everyone defaults to. But what I do know is all of them are going to need memory. All of them are going to need networking. All of them are going to need optics, power. They're going to need metals that create the hardware that they use.
So, this is where some of these other bigger companies like even Samsung become relevant. I know a lot of people think Samsung is just a Korean TV, laundry machine, and a cell phone company, but Samsung actually stands to be one of the biggest leaders in the whole entire AI stack. This is because they are one of the first major players to move into mass production of next-generation HBM at scale. HBM stands for high bandwidth memory. It's a high-performance 3D stacked RAM, and pretty much all AI processors and GPUs are going to want to default to this because of its small footprint. Now, Samsung is expected to spend around $73.3 billion in 2026 to expand their production of this.
Now, although Samsung is the most obvious and what I think is the safer, less upside kind of play, there are other metals that you can look into that are going to supply all the GPUs that will be created. Now, while everyone's focused on the GPU chips, don't neglect fiber optic transceivers. These are pretty much like your ultra-fast communication links between those chips. AI data centers need far more of these connectors than traditional ones. Right now, studies are estimating that they need roughly 36x more than what they have right now. So, the surge in demand is already pushing the optical transceiver market to grow roughly 50 to 80% in a single year, which puts them at an $18 to $23 billion market. Even Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang appears to be preparing for a future shortage there. In a most recent update, he committed about $2 billion each to optical component makers Coherent and Lumentum. Coherent in the last year is up 266%, and Lumentum, they're also up in the last 1 year 1,000%. Now, if you trade just the trend, I mean the trend on this is still strong on the higher time frame. Now, both of these companies are still going to be essential in the growth of the entire hardware space developing.
Now, while most people may look at some of these charts on these picks and shovels and think it's too late, Brian, like, you know, the the runup's already there, let me remind you just how early we still are into the whole AI adoption. The demand for GPUs is going to continue to grow, and the edge here is going to really rely on you understanding the true picks and shovels and the mechanisms that allow these GPUs to get built.
The next exposure play here is energy. Every data center, every GPU cluster, every model will still run on electricity. Goldman Sachs says that data center power consumption is going to jump 175% by 2030. And right now, more than 70% of the US grid is over 25 years old. Basically, the whole bold narrative on this is that energy is so inefficient in the US, and for AI to be where we want it to be, we're going to need to make the grid a bit better. Now, this isn't going to happen just by updating the current grid. There's going to be some alternative energy sources that are going to be needed. Right now, a lot of people are looking towards nuclear. You hear the word nuclear, you get afraid. You just think of nukes, bombs, missiles, war. But in the right hands, a company can actually use nuclear energy to provide an even more sustainable, reliable, and powerful energy source that could sustain this whole AI future that we're building into.
A few plays to be on the lookout for. One is Bloom Energy. This is emerging as a key infrastructure play in the whole AI data center power narrative. Traditional grid connections can take 3 to 5 years, but Bloom's fuel cell systems can be deployed in about 55 days, giving hyperscalers a new way to bring new AI capacity online. This technology also fits next-generation AI hardware. And already this stock has been picking up despite all the ups and downs that this has gone through. It's up 590% this year, but on the lower time frame, in the 1 month, it's been going down.
Now, obviously, none of this is financial advice. I'm just a random Korean dude making videos here on the internet. But over the last few years, I've been able to identify narratives early on, do fairly well, and God willing, if the next few years continue to be good, as the last few years have been, the things that I'm buying now, I may look back in the future and ask myself why I didn't buy more.
Now, in terms of nuclear, there's a lot of different ways you can get exposure. One example, Microsoft agreed to support restarting a reactor at 3-Mile Island. Amazon also invested in a nuclear-linked data center project. You have Vistra Corp, Constellation Energy, Cameco Corp, and even the ticker GEV, GE Vernova. Now guys, there are a ton more companies that you can make moves in, but for the sake of at least this video here, I wanted to just keep it broad so that you understand the more massive narrative so that you can pick up your research from here. If you need help doing your research, my team gets together every single day in order to spot and identify the next narratives. If you're looking for things that are more higher risk, higher reward plays, things that are not already trillions of dollars in market cap, be sure to check out the link down below. We create our own Kaizen reports and we share that with our private community. And this is where we come together, do heavy in-depth research on narratives before they take off.
Now, I don't think you can go wrong with diversity with all these plays that I mentioned here today. But if you're truly looking for more potential, it comes down to just how much risk that you can bear and finding companies that are at a much different scale. Now look, stocks and investing, they're just one lever for building wealth. If you're trying to create true generational wealth for you and your family, you need to learn to be able to pull multiple different levers. That starts with investing in yourself. The wealth transfer that I imagine is going to take place in the next 10 years isn't just about someone who has bought into the right stocks, but it's about someone who continues to sharpen their edge, stay involved in the right community, continues to learn, and like I mentioned in the beginning of the video, continue to sharpen their skills with AI. These are the people who are not just going to survive this whole wave that's coming, but they are going to excel and multiply rather than compete against this impossible force that's coming.
The barrier to building things right now and starting a business is lower than it ever has been before. AI can write your code. They can build your website, help you draft your business plan, and a lot of these tools you get access even for free these days. So, if you guys did enjoy today's video, be sure to drop a like, comment, subscribe, follow me on Instagram, and check out the links down below if you.