On Again, Off Again
The latest from Iran... AI just keeps booming... My own Claude experience... Real changes are happening... A transfer of cash… AI's 'Phase 2'...
The stories of 2026 continue...
The war in Iran is seemingly back on... or not.
We wrote to you on Tuesday about Iranian attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz. Tanker traffic in the Persian Gulf has once again slowed since then, while the "on again, off again" nature of the conflict has picked back up.
Late yesterday, President Donald Trump said Iranian officials called him to say they want to make a "deal" – again. That was less than 24 hours after Trump declared the ceasefire "over," as we wrote yesterday, and fresh U.S. strikes on Iranian targets.
Oil prices spiked yesterday to a two-week high, but futures were down more than 2% today, and the major U.S. stock indexes were up.
That short-term action aside, the longer this conflict goes on, the more it looks like Iran isn't aligned on how to approach the U.S. The hardliners doing the shooting aren't necessarily working with the Iranians doing the negotiating... So here we are, with a quagmire in the Middle East again.
Meanwhile, AI just keeps booming...
Stocks from the AI ecosystem were again among the biggest winners today. Semiconductor businesses like Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Micron Technology (MU) were up roughly 6% and 4.5%, respectively... The tech sector of the S&P 500 Index was up more than 2%.
As we've discussed, Micron is a memory-chip power with huge AI market share. Today, 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.
Also today, Meta Platforms (META) announced the release of an AI model that is 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 (Corey McLaughlin) share a quick anecdote about this...
Over the past two weeks, 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 on site hosting and other logistics. It takes just some level of specific instructions, written in plain English to Mr. Claude, and creates terrific outputs that are 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.
We've come a long way already, and 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 recommending 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 and what it was capable of doing, using the example of a full op-ed article in the British newspaper the Guardian written by AI.
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 on, I still have a job). And you probably aren't late to the AI game either, when it comes to the market impact or even learning how to use the tools yourself.
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 AI spending from those convinced of its 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 DIY 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 more to debt to finance their AI infrastructure. We've also covered other companies that don't quite see the payoff from spending on AI tools yet, like Uber Technologies (UBER).
Nobody seems to know if it's all worth it, but that's not stopping too many from spending or investing in the potential.
Starting at the top of the chain, the hyperscalers – the likes of 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 showing a "generational transfer in free cash flow"...
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 resolve sideways. 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.
For instance, as we've shared lately via Stansberry Research senior analyst Brett Eversole, we just now may be entering "Phase 2" of the AI boom. That's where the "sellers" of the technology, like Anthropic, see massive growth... And Brett says that's not the end.
There's "Phase 3," too. And it doesn't mean the "Phase 1" that we've already lived through needs to stop, either.
We touched on AI's next phase in the June 29 Digest. Brett's existing True Wealth subscribers and Stansberry Alliance members can read his full thesis and portfolio recommendation here.
And if you're interested in joining them and getting the details, click here to learn more and get started with a subscription today.
You'll hear about the indicators Brett's watching to gauge if or when the AI boom, or bubble, is near popping, and much more.
New 52-week highs (as of 7/8/26): Arista Networks (ANET), Alpha Architect 1-3 Month Box Fund (BOXX), Lamar Advertising (LAMR), Marathon Petroleum (MPC), Cloudflare (NET), and Valero Energy (VLO).
A quiet mailbag today... What? Nobody wants any more recipes? As always, send your comments, questions, or requests to feedback@stansberryresearch.com.
All the best,
Corey McLaughlin
Baltimore, Maryland
July 9, 2026