The AI Bottleneck Trade Has a $180 Billion Problem

LGD (0:00)

OpenAI and Anthropic, they are both expected to absolutely print money these next few years. After all, why wouldn't they? They are the frontier models of AI, and every few weeks, they release a new, more powerful version of their models. But what if retail and enterprise ended up using something else in the end? Something maybe a little less powerful, but also way more functional and cater to their needs. Would that put the AI trade in jeopardy? What's up, everybody? It's LGD who's here, and welcome to Milk Road Stocks, the daily market show. They can't wait for Grokbot to fix my flat tire, and yet still make it look like I did it all along. Today is September 22nd, 2026 Our lead researcher Martin is back on the show, and I don't want you to panic as I introduce the topic, which is the bare case for the AI bottleneck trade. We're going sideways right now, and as we chop, it's always helpful to assess our risk and understand why we may not go higher right away. These frontier models need to make a lot of money in the next couple of years to justify their capex, and they need to do that while fending off a lot of competition. So Martin's on the show today to take us through what that looks like and who or what that competition may be. Martin has also been prepping for a bit of a bare short-term scenario. A few weeks ago, he raised cash in his Milk Road PRO portfolio, but that doesn't mean he isn't also buying. You can see his calls and his full portfolio at the link below for just a dollar, and don't forget to like and subscribe to our channel as you enjoy the show.

Martin, happy Tuesday.

I would like to know what exactly is going on in the market, not just today, but also in the short-term stretch here, because I think a lot of people are wondering, what does it take for the AI trade to continue from here as it gets a little more uncertain?

Martin (1:38)

Yeah, agreed.

Now, Zek is doing all-time high today, so I keep asking myself, what needs to be true to remain true so we keep having this bull market from now on? So that exercise, I'm going to walk you through how I think about what needs to hold through and if I see any risks to it, and so you feel informed and updated, and you know the bar case for the whole AI trade.

LGD (2:05)

Always helpful to look at the other side, even though on Milk Road, we are generally super bullish. I think it's always worth it to check that bullishness with the counter-arguments, especially when number isn't going up, or at least on certain things that we hold, it's not going up aggressively anymore.

We need to think about why and what would make us go lower, or what it takes to go higher. So I'll throw it over to you, man. Agreed.

Martin (2:30)

I think that we are all super bullish on AI, and I agree. I'm in that camp too, but it doesn't mean that if we get more AI adoption going forward, the markets are going to show good returns, because there are some dynamics going on, which I'm going to talk about today.

AI adoption doesn't necessarily mean that markets are up only, and I'm going to talk why I think that's the case. So let me actually share a couple of charts here, and let's start with this one. We are looking at the NASDAQ and how it performed year to date.

Obviously, the first quarter wasn't that good, and then we had some Iran-US conflict, so there were a lot of tension. But at the same time, you need to realize that January, February, that was the time when OpenClaw really started. By saying OpenClaw, I mean the real ageing use of AI, and that's what caused the huge spike in that tokens usage.

It takes a couple of weeks and also macro to kind of calm down a little. Once that happens, then Anthropic as well as OpenAI, they started to show a significant growth in their numbers. That adds that fuel to the market. Like April, May, that was really good for the markets and who was allocated back at that time saw good returns. Now, summer happened and there were actually some revisions of Anthropic growth rates. So market doesn't really like that. And that's why I think one of the reasons why we are going sideways pretty much the whole summer. And so now the question is, where do we go from here? Are we going to go up or down? And like, that's what I want to talk about, because I think the key question really is about, what's the trajectory for OpenAI and Anthropic revenue? Because as I said, I think that was the biggest fuel, the biggest contributor to this year rally in AI stocks. But is it really sustainable that we keep growing at these rates? Because you can see here, even Meta or Google, they reached 100 billion in revenue after 10 years plus.