" Debt levels aren’t a problem for 2028. For now, the focus should be on finding the companies that have the best chance of benefiting from the continued buildout. Choosing an outright winner is next to impossible. But there will be outright AI winners. They could be SpaceX, Tesla (or a SpaceX/Tesla combination), Alphabet, Anthropic, and OpenAI. The safest of the AI plays is clearly Alphabet. It has an existing business that is pretty good, with operating income in 2026 projected to be north of $170 billion. Shares trade for a not unreasonable 20 times earnings expected over the coming 12 months, about in line with the S&P 500.

But infrastructure plays might be even safer, especially as demand shifts. If the first iteration of the AI trade was simply about building the best chips and sticking them in CPUs, the second will focus on building “AI factories,” according to Evercore analyst Amit Daryanani. Nvidia’s Rubin is designed to do just that by working across compute, networking, and storage, while companies like Meta Platforms and Microsoft are creating tools to minimize the cost of using AI. “We think this broadens the AI infrastructure opportunity...toward memory, networking, power, cooling, and software,” he writes."

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