The extraordinary gains in AI hardware companies may have you wondering whether the sector has entered bubble territory. Chipmakers and equipment suppliers have risen by 500% to 1,000% since the AI boom began, prompting understandable scepticism.
Read MoreThe promise of artificial intelligence has always carried an implicit economic assumption: that more computing power, applied intelligently, would drive costs down. Cheaper drug discovery. Cheaper logistics. Cheaper software development. A more productive economy with lower prices for everyone. That assumption just ran into reality. And reality, on 25 June, took the form of two back-to-back price announcements from two of the world’s most valuable companies.Giving rise to AI-flation.
Read MoreSouth Africa’s inflation rate was 3% in February 2026. A 21-year low. The SARB was projecting rate cuts. The economy was, by any reasonable measure, in the best monetary policy position it had been in for two decades.
Read MoreWhat digital sovereignty means and why it matters to investors
Digital sovereignty sounds like a policy term. In practice, it’s a procurement decision made by governments, repeated at scale, across dozens of countries simultaneously.
It means…
The biggest mistake investors could make right now is assuming the precious metals bull market is over. Gold has fallen more than 20% from its January highs. Silver has lost over 40%. Platinum has suffered a similarly painful correction.
Read MoreWhen a company raises cash by issuing new shares, it’s usually treated as bad news. Dilution. Desperation. A signal that something is wrong. But what if the largest, most profitable tech companies in the world are all doing it at the same time, and the reason isn’t weakness, but the opposite?
Read MoreRecently, Stats SA delivered a number that made for a good headline: South Africa’s GDP grew 0.5% quarter-on-quarter in Q1 2026 – ahead of the 0.3% economists expected, and the sixth consecutive quarter of growth.
Read MoreAfter markets closed, Broadcom – the seventh-largest company in the world by market cap – posted what it described as “record revenue, record operating profit, and record free cash flow.” And then its stock fell 14%. That reaction says more about investor psychology in the current AI market than it does about Broadcom’s business. Understanding the gap between those two things is one of the most important skills an investor can develop right now.
Read MoreNvidia quarterly results were exceptional. Revenue for the first quarter of fiscal year 2027 surged 85% year-on-year to $81.6 billion, comfortably ahead of market expectations. Adjusted earnings per share also beat forecasts, while Data Centre revenue, the core engine of the AI boom, climbed 92% to $75.2 billion.
Read MoreA new record was created on Wall Street last week. Not by a technology company, chipmaker or an AI startup. Instead, it came from the power industry.
Read MoreAlmost every AI conversation eventually gets to the models – ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok. That’s where the public attention goes. That’s what gets the headlines.
But behind every one of those models is a layer of infrastructure that most investors never think about: the networks that move the data, the pipes connecting the processors, and the teams cleaning and labelling the training data that makes the intelligence possible in the first place.
These are the picks-and-shovels of the AI gold rush. And right now, three companies operating in this space are posting numbers that are genuinely hard to ignore.
“Can China and the United States overcome the so-called Thucydides Trap and create a new paradigm of major-country relations?”
That question is not neutral. It is not diplomatic small talk. It is a frame. And once you understand the frame, the entire relationship, and everything that comes out of Beijing this week looks very different.
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