By Bridget Bennett
Publication Date: 2026-05-26 13:40:00
The biggest growth stories in the market right now aren’t happening with the chip makers. They’re happening one layer beneath them.
Keith Kaplan, CEO of TradeSmith, has spent recent months mapping what he calls the “choke points” of the AI build-out—the physical bottlenecks where trillion-dollar demand is running into a world that can’t supply fast enough. His argument: the largest fortunes of this AI cycle won’t go to the visible players. They’ll go to the companies that those players can’t function without.
The $700 Billion Problem
By the end of 2025, the four largest U.S. hyperscalers—Microsoft NASDAQ: MSFT, Alphabet NASDAQ: GOOGL, Amazon NASDAQ: AMZN, and Meta Platforms NASDAQ: META—are expected to spend more than $700 billion on AI infrastructure. That number climbs toward $1 trillion by 2027 and, according to projections shared by NVIDIA NASDAQ: NVDA during its most recent earnings call, could reach $3 to $4 trillion in total economic impact within three to five years.
That money isn’t going into software. It’s going into football-field-sized buildings, gigawatt-scale power systems, and transmission lines that don’t exist yet. Think of it as demand being squeezed through a very narrow pipe: no matter how much water is upstream, the flow is whatever the choke point allows.
Kaplan identifies five of those choke points, and a stock for each.
