Robotaxis, NVDA, AMD & the Trillion-Dollar AI Demand Boom Ahead

the New York Stock Exchange alongside Marley Kayden over in Chicago to discuss how AI is reshaping the economy. Let's welcome in our next guest, please. Guest. Pleased to say we are joined by Brett Winton, chief futurist over at Ark. Brett, thank you so much for your time this afternoon. It's really nice to see you. So you say AI is now a macro force. Talk us through that. I mean, give us a perspective on this sort of trickle down economics we're seeing from all this CapEx. I don't know if I'd use the term trickle down economics, but the way to understand it is, is disruptive technologies like AI, you get paid macroeconomically four times as they proliferate through the economy. The first time is on the accelerated rate of investment. Look at the mega cap tech companies that previously were sitting on cash. They're now using that cash to build data centers. Those data centers employ people who have to dig up the ground and install all the equipment. And then we think that the return on that invested capital is much higher than in other uses. So I think, you know, you were talking about the core. We've quarter. I think the street is massively under forecasting the return on invested capital potential in infrastructure as a service specifically right now. So you get an accelerated rate of return. You get higher yields, then you get paid again when you displace or you create market activity that didn't previously exist. Think about driving. We're about to enter a universe of robo taxis where robo taxis will drive us around. Right now, we spend 99% of our driver driving miles doing so manually. It's a waste of our beautiful human brains. And so we're going to be willing to pay robo taxi services to offload that. And that will free us up the fourth way we get paid to do other things. You know, maybe that's consuming Netflix or watching TikTok, or maybe it's creating a new business. And so we think that the, the initial stages of macroeconomic growth driven by disruptive technology, which we're seeing today in data center investments, is just the first in a four step process that will accelerate the macroeconomic growth rate. Oh, I hope for the future of our children. It's not watching TikTok with that downtime that we have. But as we talk about AI now being a macroeconomic force, Brett, what is the single economic statistic that you think is already being changed by AI? Well, you can already see it in capital formation and CapEx. At a micro level, you can see that firms that are more heavily indexed to using AI are hiring more employees. So at the end, individual firm level, I think there's this false narrative that AI is going to eliminate jobs. It's actually the entire opposite where firms that are using AI are finding more ways to provision services to end customers. And so they need more people on board to effectively harness these tools. And so I think you will see over the course of this decade, real GDP growth in excess of 7% annualized by 2030. So we're going to see an inflection and growth, the likes of which we haven't seen since the advent, the introduction of electrification, telephony and the internal combustion engine at the turn of the 1900s. So this is going to be a transformation in macroeconomic activity that will experience over the course of this decade. And it's so it's the perfect market time for this to happen, because people are so skeptical of even the marginal data center yielding a return. So I think it's a great setup for equity investors. Brett, the firm took advantage of yesterday's brief dip in Nvidia's shares off the back of that announcement and loaded up on some more. I'm just wondering what you made of the news of the day. Jensen Huang obviously talking about chips becoming a new asset class to invest in. And obviously some new tech writers now in town. Yeah, I think that the world is massively short compute. Like we need a lot more of this stuff. One way to think about it, people are skeptical of this cycle. Right now, a little more than 20% of smartphone users are using AI chatbots like ChatGPT just for asking questions. And roughly, we think 2 to 5% of knowledge workers are actually using agentic tools like Codex and cloud code. And so 21% are low 20% penetration is the same spot we were in internet penetration in 1996. That was two years before Google was even incorporated and founded, and 1 to 5% penetration. That's where we were 1990 during the internet boom. So before the browser was even something that people were aware of. So we think we're very early in this cycle. And as more users come on board to use AI as knowledge workers, fully kind of figure out how to use agents on their behalf, we're going to see screaming compute demand. In fact, we think trillions of dollars in demand by 2030. And so that will drive demand for Nvidia's chips and AMD's chips and AWS services and core services. I think people are really underestimating the scale of what's about to occur. And Brett, with the inflation data coming our way tomorrow, Sam and I have been talking about inflation all day, and especially in the broader conversation of the fed. I'd love to get your thoughts on if you view AI and AI productivity as eventually being deflationary or inflationary. Sure. I mean, AI in the knowledge workspace, clearly people are using it to do more. I think, in the embodied space. So think robo taxis and humanoid robots that will clearly collapse the cost of of doing certain things. Just getting around town right now, we think at, at, at maturity robotaxis on a cash cost basis, the cost of provisioning that service will be less than the marginal cost of you driving a car that you've already bought and, and fully paid off. And so you'll be willing to pay more than that because you're saving time by doing so. But it means the cost of getting around from place to place will collapse. Now you would think, hey, that actually suppresses in demand. Not so because when the cost of things collapse, particularly in technology, people use a lot more of them. Think of all the things where your kid wants to go to the movies or visit a friends, and you're like, I can't drive you all the way over there. I'm not going to do that. If you can stick the kid in a robotaxi for an inexpensive per mile price, you'll happily do it. So we think there'll be an explosion in economic activity that's associated with these declining costs. Brett, really appreciate you taking the time to be with us.