The thesis
Every major technological wave has its picks-and-shovels suppliers — the businesses that profit regardless of which platform or company comes out on top. In the Californian Gold Rush, it was the merchants selling the picks, shovels, pans and other essential supplies who made fortunes. In the AI industrial revolution, it's the chipmakers, memory producers, equipment suppliers and the infrastructure companies that are the essential enablers of this technological transformation.
This playlist brings together some of the most important enablers of the AI era — including semiconductor fabs like TSMC, Renesas, Infineon and STMicro, with ASML, the world's leading supplier of lithography systems, and memory specialists such as SK Hynix, Micron and Samsung, along with other leading suppliers that make large-scale computation possible.
Whilst most investor attention is focused on the headline AI names, it is in the supply chain where sustained demand visibility, high returns and durable growth are most predictable.
Key themes
- Semiconductors — the processing power enabling AI training and inference
- Memory — DRAM, NAND and HBM suppliers scaling to meet exponential model demands
- Equipment — world-leading lithography systems critical to increasingly sophisticated chip production at scale
- Cloud-scale data centre providers — some of the world's leading hyperscale datacentre operators
- Foundries – the world's biggest semiconductor foundries
