Today’s stories reveal AI’s transformation from software phenomenon to industrial complex. The Big Five tech giants now generate $400 billion per quarter—concentration accelerating, not stabilizing. AI infrastructure wars are measured in gigawatts. Copper surges as the physical material enabling everything digital. Waymo crosses 4 million rides, proving autonomous vehicles work commercially. And diamond—yes, carbon crystal—may define computing’s next era. The throughline: AI is no longer just about algorithms. It’s about atoms, electrons, and infrastructure that takes decades to build.
💰 Markets & Capital
Big Five Quarterly Revenue Hits $400B
Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta combined now generate over $400 billion in a single quarter—more than most countries’ annual GDP. The concentration is accelerating, not stabilizing. Network effects compound, cloud infrastructure creates switching costs, and AI capabilities require scale smaller players cannot match.
AI Startups Raised $150B in 2025
Record funding—but extreme concentration. A handful of foundation model companies captured the majority. The long tail faces a paradox: unprecedented enthusiasm, increasingly difficult fundraising. The implicit bet: winner-take-all dynamics will produce returns justifying valuations.
2025’s Defining Story: Not NVIDIA—The Bond Market
While markets obsessed over AI stocks, the bond market signaled regime change. Yield curve dynamics, credit spreads, duration repricing—each revealed structural shifts in how capital markets function. The mental model update: the most important market is often the one getting least attention.
🤖 AI & Infrastructure
The AI Infrastructure War Is Now Measured in Gigawatts
Chip availability dominated 2023-2024. Power availability will dominate 2025-2026. Frontier training runs require power equivalent to small cities. Hyperscalers are signing multi-gigawatt agreements, building substations, investing in power plants. Vertical integration now extends to electricity.
Can Decentralized AI Training Become Competitive?
Centralized training dominates—but decentralized alternatives are emerging. Distributed computation faces 2-10x efficiency gaps, but if decentralized compute is cheap enough, economics could flip. The disruption pattern: start with tolerant use cases, improve iteratively, eventually challenge incumbents.
Cursor Is the Uber of the 2010s
Just as Uber subsidized rides, Cursor subsidizes AI-assisted coding. Classic blitzscaling: sacrifice unit economics for speed to defensible market position. The bet: developer habits formed now create switching costs later.
🚗 Autonomous Vehicles
Waymo Crossed 4 Million Paid Rides in Q3
4 million paid rides in a single quarter—autonomous vehicles have reached commercial scale. The learning curve is working: more rides generate more data, enabling better performance. For ride-hailing incumbents, existential questions emerge about drivers as transition technology.
🔬 Deep Tech & Materials
Synthetic Diamonds: Beyond Jewelry
Lab-grown diamonds are becoming critical technology infrastructure: semiconductor substrates handling power densities silicon can’t tolerate, heat spreaders outperforming alternatives, quantum sensors with unprecedented sensitivity. Cost curves have plummeted 90%+, unlocking applications previously impossible.
Diamonds and Quantum Computing
Diamond-based qubits could enable room-temperature quantum computing—no extreme cooling required. Nitrogen-vacancy centers maintain quantum coherence at room temperature. If scalable, this disrupts cryogenic approaches entirely. Carbon could define computing’s future as silicon defined its past.
Copper Surging Toward Records
Every data center runs on copper. Every power line enabling AI runs on copper. New mines take 10-15 years to develop. Current prices signal shortage that can’t be solved quickly. The second-order effect: copper prices flow through to AI infrastructure economics.
The Throughline
Today’s stories share a revelation: AI’s constraints are increasingly physical, not digital. Power measured in gigawatts. Copper connecting everything. Diamonds enabling quantum breakthroughs. Vehicles proving commercial viability. Capital concentrating in giants who can build at scale.
The strategic shift is profound. AI investing moves from pure software plays to infrastructure bets with multi-decade horizons. Winners will be those who secure physical resources—power, materials, manufacturing capacity—that software companies traditionally ignored.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
