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

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
We're going to discuss how AI is reshaping the economy. Let's welcome in our next guest. Please, guest, please just 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.

**Brett Winton** (0:23)
I don't know if I'd use the term trickle down economics, but the way to understand it 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 were talking about the Coraweave 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 Robotaxis where Robotaxis will drive us around. Right now, we spend 99 percent of our driving miles doing so manually. It's a waste of our beautiful human brains. So we're going to be willing to pay Robotaxis services to offload that. That'll free us up the fourth way we get paid to do other things. Maybe that's consuming Netflix or watching TikTok, or maybe it's creating a new business.
We think that 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'll accelerate the macroeconomic growth rate.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:58)
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 forespread, what is the single economic statistic that you think is already being changed by AI?

**Brett Winton** (2:16)
Well, you can already see it in capital formation in 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 individual firm level, I think there's this 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.
So I think you will see over the course of this decade, real GDP growths in excess of 7 percent annualized by 2030 So we're going to see an inflection and growth, the likes of which we haven't seen since 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 we'll 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.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:28)
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 check writers now in town.

**Brett Winton** (3:49)
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 chat bots like ChatGPT just for asking questions.
Roughly, we think 2-5% of knowledge workers are actually using agentic tools like Codex and Clodcode.
21% or 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 1-5% penetration, that's where we were 1990 during the Internet boom, so before the browser was even something that people were aware of. We think we're very early in this cycle, and as more users come on board to use AI, as knowledge workers fully 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'll drive demand for Nvidia's chips and AMD's chips, and AWS's services and CoreWeave's services. I think people are really underestimating the scale of what's about to occur.