AI Picks & Shovels
The companies selling to the AI gold rush.
- Creator
- @prakhar
- Fee
- 0.5%
- Horizon
- 3 years +
- Min buy
- $215
- Self-buy
- House basket, none
NVDA 30%
MSFT 20%
GOOGL 20%
MRVL 15%
META 15%Minimum $215. Pay with any token on any chain.
EVM wallets: use Connect in the top bar.
Min buy $215 · creator fee 0.5% + platform fee on buys · selling is free.
Holdings
The default AI chip. Most of this basket's past return came from here.
Biggest enterprise AI distributor through Azure and Office.
Own chips (TPUs), own models, own cloud. Hedges the Nvidia bet a little.
Custom AI chips and data-centre networking. Barely moved with Microsoft over the past year (correlation 0.04).
Spends heavily on AI infrastructure and turns it into ad revenue.
Thesis
In a gold rush, the people selling shovels get paid whoever finds the gold. In AI, the shovels are chips, networking and cloud capacity.
Nvidia makes the GPUs. Marvell makes custom chips and the networking that ties data centres together. Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta are the biggest buyers, and also run the clouds and models people use.
Over the last five years this mix would have turned $1,000 into about $3,100, roughly 25% a year, against about $1,640 in SPY. Nvidia did most of the work: about 150 of the 210 points of gain.
That concentration is the point and the risk.
Risks
Heavily tied to one theme. If AI spending slows, these fall together. The worst drop over five years was 53%. Nvidia alone drove most of the past return, which may not repeat.
Exit signal
I'd exit if the big cloud companies cut data-centre spending guidance two quarters in a row.