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The artificial intelligence boom is fueling a historic surge in technology valuations, pushing several major firms past the trillion-dollar threshold and sparking record investments in semiconductor companies. Nvidia, the undisputed leader in AI accelerators, has become the face of this new era, its valuation soaring as demand for AI data centers and generative computing power explodes. Other chipmakers — including AMD, Intel, and Broadcom — are seeing renewed investor enthusiasm as they race to capture a share of the expanding AI infrastructure market.
This capital wave extends beyond chip design to foundries like TSMC and Samsung, which are ramping up advanced process technologies to meet insatiable demand for high-performance chips. Cloud providers such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are also pouring billions into custom AI silicon and high-bandwidth memory solutions to strengthen their AI cloud platforms.
Analysts view this as a structural transformation rather than a short-term bubble. The convergence of AI, data, and advanced semiconductors is reshaping global technology supply chains and investment flows. With hardware now defining the limits of AI progress, chipmakers have emerged as the core beneficiaries of a trillion-dollar boom that is rewriting the future of computing.
Powell said the Fed is walking a tightrope as AI-fueled investment props up growth but erodes hiring.
fortune.com
Not sure how tenable it is to have most of your population unemployed, overeducated, dehumanized while the people who own the machines become obscenely wealthy. Historically that kind of dynamic will shred the social fabric, which will be bad for valuations.
I have a friend at a Bill Gates funded nuclear start-up and he says yes and much safer. It is certainly low carbon. Hard to believe but the US still burns coal for electricity which certainly is not clean. Not as much as China or India though. The mega AI datacenters we are building consume low single digit percentage of the worlds electricity today but it could be double digit if all of the press releases come true in the next few years (2030). And what about all of the EV cars? Either way the world has an energy crisis coming, absolutely. It is shocking to me why solar panels are not required for new buildings and parking lots. It is nice to have solar panels protecting my car from the elements. Seems like a no brainer. Yes I have solar on my sailboat so I am doing my part .
ChatGPT:
Global coal consumption (2023): roughly 8.3 billion tons
Top coal consumers:
China: ~4.6 billion tons per year (≈ 55% of global total)
Used mainly for electricity generation, steelmaking, and industrial heat.
India: ~1.2 billion tons (≈ 14%)
Rapidly growing consumption to meet expanding power demand.
United States: ~426 million tons (≈ 5%)
Usage declining as utilities switch to natural gas and renewables.
Just as the invention of the steam engine nurtured the emergence of Marxist thought, the rise of artificial intelligence will inevitably drive a major transformation of contemporary free-market and institutional capitalist societies, promoting the revival of humanism.
Powell said the Fed is walking a tightrope as AI-fueled investment props up growth but erodes hiring.
fortune.com
Not sure how tenable it is to have most of your population unemployed, overeducated, dehumanized while the people who own the machines become obscenely wealthy. Historically that kind of dynamic will shred the social fabric, which will be bad for valuations.
People need to be far more worried about this than they are. The decoupling of the economy — e.g. the middle class floundering while the corporate economy soars — is going to lead to enormous social unrest.
What we’re seeing now is only the rumblings. The earth quake hasn’t hit yet.
This pure capitalism around “AI everything” without thinking about the economy and society holistically will absolutely not end well.
Just as the invention of the steam engine nurtured the emergence of Marxist thought, the rise of artificial intelligence will inevitably drive a major transformation of contemporary free-market and institutional capitalist societies, promoting the revival of humanism.
That era of industrialization tore people from the lands and piled them into cities where a shared working class identity could coalesce into something formidable. The modern Western subject is completely atomized, dopamine addicted, deskilled, obsessed with individual identity and negative liberty. I think the more likely outcome for America would follow the precedent of the cotton gin, which Eli Whitney believed would end slavery. It did indeed create exponential growth of the cotton industry and massive profits, but at the cost of complete dehumanization of an entire race. Eventually this contradiction became so untenable that the country exploded into a civil war, after which point something should've transformed about our free-market capitalist society. But instead the humanist gains were mostly undone by subsequent generations of leaders, and the dynamic was allowed to repeat itself with the end of colonialism and the world wars, and now again with the end of neocolonialism and WWIII.
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China: ~4.6 billion tons per year (≈ 55% of global total)
India: ~1.2 billion tons (≈ 14%)
United States: ~426 million tons (≈ 5%)