Dear Investor,
For most of the AI boom so far, the story has been about computing power. All the big players have been competing on capacity, and the companies making computer chips have quietly captured the lion’s share of both the headlines and the market's money.
That story is shifting.
The chips still matter. But the hard limit on how fast AI can grow is no longer solely the supply of computing power.
Increasingly, it’s the supply of energy, and the physical infrastructure needed to generate it, deliver it, house it and use it.
The scale is hard to overstate. The International Energy Agency expects the electricity used by data centres worldwide to roughly double between 2025 and 2030, approaching 3% of all the power used on the planet.
Research house Gartner has gone further, forecasting that a large share of AI data centres will soon be held back not by a shortage of chips, but by a shortage of electricity to run them.
Australia sits inside this trend, not on its sidelines. Amazon alone has committed around A$20 billion to Australian data centres by 2029, described as the largest technology investment in the nation's history, and Microsoft has pledged billions more.
Here's why that matters for investors.
When a single resource becomes the binding constraint on an entire industry, the businesses that supply it tend to accrue enormous value.
It's the logic of the gold rush. More often than not, the reliable money was made selling picks and shovels, not panning for gold.
That's the idea behind our latest Share Advisor report. We call it:
