Managing Editor’s Note: The discourse around AI has reached a fever pitch. Are we in a boom, or a bubble? We want to make sure you’re hearing the latest news and research from experts on the subject.
That’s why we encourage you to check out this essay from founder and CEO of Brownstone Research, Jeff Brown – one of the earliest AI bulls and a long-respected name in tech investing – below.
What’s more, he’s giving a briefing tonight at 8 p.m. ET to discuss the little-known small caps that stand to benefit from what’s happening in AI right now. Go right here to make sure you don’t miss out.
Jeff Brown here, founder and CEO of Brownstone Research. There has been a massive trend of large data centers popping up all over the American heartland, and I’ve been traveling across the country for years monitoring it.
My most recent trip was just a couple weeks ago when I set foot in six states.
This is what I saw.
Tucked between fields of corn and soy, huge tech firms like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Tesla are pouring billions into building massive AI factories.
Standing amidst endless rows of head-high corn stalks, it just seems so out of place.
Massive in size with industrial-scale cooling equipment outside and fenced-in with security cameras surrounding the facilities… these buildings are something that we’d expect to find in an urban industrial park.
They just don’t seem to make any sense surrounded by rolling agricultural hills, residential homes, and farmsteads.
In the picture above, off to my left is actually a horse farm tucked in between the corn fields. And on the right in the background is one of the largest data centers, currently under construction, that I’ve ever seen.
And yet, these data centers are popping up everywhere… and seemingly always in the places we’d least expect to see them.
AI factories are the name being given to leading edge data centers by Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang.
He believes they’ll kick off “A new AI industrial revolution [that] will be as transformative and incomprehensible to many as the electricity revolution was.”
I know that’s an incredible claim to make. I know that might be hard for us to believe, it’s a big claim.
But Huang has a rare glimpse into the future of AI. Afterall, his company is building the GPUs that are making the next generation of AI possible. He’s getting firsthand reports on AI’s that the public won’t see for another year or more.
He and his team at NVIDIA are part of making that future a reality. And Huang isn’t alone in his predictions.
Researchers at IBM said that there is a new breed of AI has the potential to “revolutionize nearly every aspect of human life and work.”
And Forbes wrote that this new AI “Will Eventually Reshape Everything.”
You’re probably wondering what this new generation of AI is.
That’s exactly why I hit the road to take a tour of America’s heartland. I needed to do more boots on the ground research on these new AI factories to understand the next revolution in AI.
See, these locations are strategic. They all have two things in common: large amounts of cheap land and co-located with a power station that can provide a whole lot of cheap electricity.
Thanks to fiber optic networks that can connect these data centers to the world at the speed of light, they can be constructed just about anywhere. They are part of the “cloud” – an amorphous industry word used to simply explain a data center located just about anywhere on Earth.
If it’s “in the cloud,” that doesn’t mean it’s “up there in the sky somewhere,” it’s right here on Earth surrounded by green fields of future food. It’s about as real as it gets.
The latest explosion in data center construction is grounded not by pie-in-the-sky projections, but in hardcore necessities. It’s founded in the physics and software needed to create intelligence.
The story that has captured the media’s attention has been the torrid competition taking place in real-time to create the best-performing large language model (LLM). LLMs in a nutshell are machine learning models that can comprehend and generate human language text.
OpenAI kicked off the race in November 2022 with its release of ChatGPT.
Since then, new LLM models have been popping up out of corn fields every couple of months since then.
The latest round of LLMs is remarkable. The next evolution of AI is here.
Regards,
Jeff Brown
Founder, Brownstone Research
P.S. Don’t miss my special briefing, airing tonight at 8PM ET. In it I’ll share the little-known small caps that stand to benefit from this seismic AI shift the most – and which ones to avoid like the plague.
Go right here to get a reminder.