AI to power 2nd major revolution in Internet with $1 tn investments

T.N. Ashok

Washington, Nov 18 (IANS) Artificial Intelligence (AI) is set to power the second major revolution in the internet, better known as the Information Superhighway, with major tech companies pouring billions of dollars into research to make what was science fiction yesterday a reality today. The AI-powered market could exceed $1 trillion by 2026 with applications across a wide spectrum of industries from healthcare to automobiles to manufacturing processes.   

ChatGPT probably kicked off the AI revolution in the next stage of the internet through OpenAI. But the information superhighway now needs a major expansion, technology publications say.  

AI has triggered a new tech boom that will make the boom in internet stocks in the 1990s look tame.

The AI investing cycles generally begin with build outs on hardware first, very similar to the internet in the 1990s. 

Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta and other tech firms are expected to spend $250 billion in hardware over the next year, says Colin Tedards, Editor, The Bleeding Edge. 

Most of Bleeding Edge's information comes out of Brownstone Research firm's insight into chips and semiconductor technologies through its research papers.

As more companies join the AI race, spending ramps up. 

US's largest AI chipmaker Nvidia says the bill will top $1 trillion in the next three years. That's why shares of Nvidia and other AI hardware makers went berserk this year. Nvidia's share price tripled. Super Micro Computer, which makes high-performance server and storage systems for AI training, is up 250 per cent this year.

And 'Onto Innovation', which sells semiconductor inspection equipment, has rallied 101 per cent year-to-date. And these gains are just the start…., says Tedards.

AI is an even more powerful technology… with even more profound implications for the economy… than the internet was. So, expect the gains from the AI boom to eclipse the gains folks made in the 1990s.

More Than Just ChatGPT: AI's will not only help us search for information online. They'll also help educate our kids… drive our cars and trucks… diagnose and treat diseases… and help us solve some of the hardest problems facing humanity, the editor of the tech publication said.

For instance, researchers are already using AI to help us achieve nuclear fusion. That would be an infinite energy source to power the planet that doesn't emit any CO2. Fusion releases nearly four million times more energy than burning coal, oil or gas. This makes fusion a potential source of base load energy, which is the minimum amount of electricity needed to power the energy grid at any given time.

Most people have not realised the power of AI yet. All they see are doomsday scenarios. And that's not a surprise. Washington wants us to be afraid of AI so that it can regulate it, he said.

But AI is about to enter an age of abundance that will make our heads spin. And when you have a megatrend like that, the gains on offer are potentially life-changing. Especially if you invest in the early stages of the boom before stock prices skyrocket. Brokerages are recommending stock buyers to invest in AI infrastructure stocks to profit. There are tiny companies to invest in as compared to tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple and Tesla. 

But like Cisco during the internet boom, they will build the physical infrastructure needed to make the AI revolution possible. If history is a guide to go by then, we have the chance to earn 10 times or more of our money. AI has reached a level of intelligence far higher than what we hear about on the news. AI systems have started to evolve and change… in ways not even their creators understand. The AI explosion we've seen since the launch of ChatGPT last November has blown our minds away, the editor said.

Today, we take the internet for granted. We have remote meetings with work colleagues… We video call family and friends… we stream music, TV shows and music… we book flights and hotels… and we do our shopping online.

Nearly five billion people around the world account for 60 per cent of the planet's population. But before this became a reality, companies poured hundreds of billions of dollars into building out the physical infrastructure. Most people are clueless or don't even think about the enormity of how the internet works. But 750,000 miles of fibre-optic cables criss-cross between continents on the ocean floor. That's enough to wrap around Earth more than 30 times.

Add to that land-based cable networks, and one is looking at millions of miles of cabling. There are also close to 400 million internet servers -- most of them housed in giant data centres. They are the bartenders of the digital world. They serve up the movies, songs, images, and text that make up the internet, Tedard says.

It's the reason people called the internet the Information Superhighway. It's the physical infrastructure that makes our digital lives possible. The companies that built this highway delivered fortune-making returns. We have another shot to profit as we build out a new Information Superhighway for the AI revolution. First, one must grasp the scale of the gains on offer in the late 1990s when the internet boom was underway.

--IANS

ash/khz