In 2013, my friend Brian watched a 3D printer build a plastic wrench at a Las Vegas tech expo and thought… this is going to change everything.
He wasn't wrong about the technology.
He was however, spectacularly wrong about where the money was.
Over the next two years, Brian poured $50,000 into 3D printing stocks. And by 2022, he'd lost 90% of it.
There's a version of this story where Brian buys the boring companies supplying the materials… or the infrastructure the 3D printing revolution actually needed to function.
That version doesn't make for a great story at dinner parties… but it also doesn't end with an $40,000 hole in his portfolio.
I've watched the same pattern play out again now with AI…
Investors are piling into companies with pitches like AI-Powered Veterinary Diagnostics - mostly pre-revenue outfits with a compelling pitch deck… but approximately zero customers.
Meanwhile... the companies actually MAKING MONEY from AI are sitting right there on the stock exchange.
Hiding in plain sight, because they don't have AI in their name.
Think about it this way…
When the California Gold Rush hit in 1848, the people who got rich weren't the prospectors.
It was the picks and shovels sellers… and people like Levi Strauss that built an empire while most of the prospectors went home broke.
AI has its own version of the picks-and-shovels trade...
These are established businesses — profitable ones, with real revenue and real customers — whose growth has quietly gone vertical because every major corporation on the planet now needs what they sell.
I covered three of them at Investormania in Tampa last week.
Companies that are infrastructure plays on the AI boom... the kind of businesses that get paid regardless of which AI model wins the arms race.
The recordings are available now, and if you grab them before Monday at 11:59PM ET, you can get $100 off.
Oliver