AI Is Still Earlier Than Most Investors Think
The Weekend Edition is pulled from the daily Stansberry Digest.
AI just keeps booming...
Stocks from the AI ecosystem have boomed this year.
Semiconductor businesses like Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Micron Technology (MU) are up roughly 135% and 200% in 2026, respectively, even with some declines lately. The tech sector of the S&P 500 Index is up around 20%.
Micron is a memory-chip powerhouse with a huge AI market share. And last week, the company announced plans to invest up to $3 billion "to strengthen the U.S. semiconductor supply-chain ecosystem." It also raised its planned overall U.S. investment to $250 billion through 2035, a roughly 25% increase from earlier projections.
As part of its strategy, Micron said it will provide $500 million in financing to Taiwan-headquartered GlobalWafers to expand a silicon-wafer plant in rural Sherman, Texas. The deal includes a 10-year supply agreement.
And Micron isn't the only AI leader expanding this month...
On July 7, Meta Platforms (META) announced the release of its "strongest model for agentic and coding work yet," a company exec told CNBC. The social media giant is looking to keep pace with Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's ChatGPT tools.
Meta's Muse Spark 1.1 will be available to select partners to start with $20 in free credits. The company will then charge $1.25 per million "tokens" in input and $4.25 per million tokens of output. In other words, customers will pay for the amount of work they ask the AI to perform for them.
"The goal is to really have attractive pricing that scales with immense consumption usage," Meta's AI chief Alexandr Wang told CNBC.
Let me share a quick anecdote about this...
This month, I've spent my spare time building a sports-related website. I've wanted to do this project for ages. But in previous years (each of the past 20), I've found the idea too difficult and time-consuming to create on my own. I'd rather do other things.
In the past few weeks, I've found that has changed... thanks to Anthropic's AI tools.
I am blown away by Claude's coding capabilities, translating English to HTML and even guiding me through on-site hosting and other logistics. It takes just some level of specific instructions, written in plain English to Mr. Claude, and the platform creates terrific outputs that have substantially improved from even a year ago.
With not much difficulty or frustration, I created a multilayered dynamic website from scratch in my spare time, and it's already getting Google traffic in a matter of weeks.
This sort of thing, in this amount of time, would have taken huge staffs and huge amounts of money to do before. Instead, Anthropic is charging $20 per month for a workable amount of access.
This kind of thing is happening at scale in the U.S. and around the world, among individuals, businesses, and institutions.
AI Winners Are Expanding... and Rotating
We've come a long way already. How much longer is the road?...
The emergence of AI isn't new. Our team has been following it for years, including Stansberry Venture Technology editor Dave Lashmet, who wrote about "artificial brains" when he recommended shares of Nvidia (NVDA) in May 2016.
I thought I was late to the game when I wrote about a new version of artificial intelligence back in 2020. I was fascinated by what it was capable of doing, using the example of a fully AI-generated op-ed article in the British newspaper the Guardian.
We discussed what jobs the tech might be able to replace (including our own). As I said in a Digest titled "A Robot Wrote This"...
We share this story not to scare anyone, but to simply point out that AI has arrived...
You can be optimistic or pessimistic about these technologies changing the way a lot of people do business and perceive the overall job market... But no matter your stance, it wouldn't be wise to ignore these trends completely.
Some of the biggest companies in the world – and highest-returning stocks – are investing heavily in this space... And our editors have been tracking the developments for years.
But we were not late (and nearly six years later, I still have a job). And you probably aren't late to learning how AI will impact the market – or the tools themselves.
We wrote way back in 2020 that AI had already come a long way from previous iterations. In 2026, the impact of AI might only be starting to hit real life and economies at scale... And spending from those convinced of AI's potential isn't slowing down yet.
The changes are happening...
Now, whether companies use AI to become more profitable or generate revenue is another thing. (The same goes for my do-it-yourself website. Is it worth it? I don't know yet, but it can't hurt to learn how to use the technology...)
We've written increasingly over the past year or so about how the "hyperscalers" are turning to debt to finance their AI infrastructure. We've also covered other companies that don't quite see the payoff from AI spending yet, like Uber Technologies (UBER).
Nobody seems to know if it's all worth it, but that's not stopping folks from spending or investing in the potential.
Starting at the top of the chain, the hyperscalers –like Amazon (AMZN), Alphabet (GOOGL), Meta, Microsoft (MSFT), and Oracle (ORCL) – were mostly known for being free-cash-flow giants. But the more AI investments they've made, the less capital-efficient they've become...
The ones generating gobs of free cash flow now are the semiconductor companies, like Nvidia, Micron, Broadcom (AVGO), and Applied Materials (AMAT). Check out this chart from Bank of America...
The "picks and shovels" of AI are cashing in (and have been for a bit). Yet at the same time, anytime we see a parabolic chart like this, it's a reminder that such booms rarely level off. Growth like this can't go on forever... And when it stops, these stocks can fall hard.
Still, it's also hard to imagine demand for these semiconductor businesses falling completely off a cliff.
There's no denying that AI-related fundamental changes are happening right now... and likely aren't finished.
This AI-fueled bull market continues to be relentless (despite risks like continued war and inflation uncertainty). And it may have longer to run than many people imagine.
We're going to keep looking for investments in the space.
All the best,
Corey McLaughlin
Editor's note: The AI boom isn't standing still... and neither are the market's biggest winners. As leadership changes, MarketWise CEO Dr. David "Doc" Eifrig believes investors need a better way to spot what's coming next. That's why he developed a new system designed to help folks identify tomorrow's leaders before the rest of the pack.