Why Is Big Tech Invading American Cornfields?

Managing Editor’s Note: The discourse around AI has reached a fever pitch this year. And many are asking… are we in a boom or a bubble?

At Trading With Larry Benedict, we want to make sure you’re hearing the latest news and research from experts on the subject.

That’s why today, we’re bringing you this message from tech investor Jeff Brown, one of the earliest AI bulls…

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There has been a massive trend of large data centers popping up all over the American heartland, and I’ve been traveling across the country for years monitoring it. 

My most recent trip was just a couple of weeks ago when I set foot in six states. 

Tucked between fields of corn and soy, huge tech firms like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Tesla are pouring billions into building massive “AI factories.”

Standing amid endless rows of head-high corn stalks, it just seems so out of place.

Massive in size with industrial-scale cooling equipment outside and fenced-in with security cameras surrounding the facilities… these buildings are something that we’d expect to find in an urban industrial park.

They just don’t seem to make any sense surrounded by rolling agricultural hills, residential homes, and farmsteads.

In the picture above, off to my left is a horse farm tucked in between the corn fields. And on the right in the background is one of the largest data centers – currently under construction – that I’ve ever seen.

And yet, these data centers are popping up everywhere… and seemingly always in the places we’d least expect to see them.

“AI factories” are the name being given to cutting-edge data centers by Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang.

He believes they’ll kick off “a new AI industrial revolution [that] will be as transformative and incomprehensible to many as the electricity revolution was.”

I know that’s an incredible claim to make. It’s such a big claim, it might be hard for us to believe.

[Note: Jeff Brown aired an emergency meeting last night to discuss the little-known small caps that stand to benefit from this seismic AI shift. Click here to watch a replay of the event.]

But Huang has a rare glimpse into the future of AI. After all, his company is building the graphics processing units that are making the next generation of AI possible. He’s getting firsthand reports on AIs that the public won’t see for another year or more.

He and his team at Nvidia are part of making that future a reality. And Huang isn’t alone in his predictions.

Researchers at IBM said that there is a new breed of AI that has the potential to “revolutionize nearly every aspect of human life and work.”

And Forbes wrote that this new AI “will eventually reshape everything.”

You’re probably wondering what this new generation of AI is.

That’s exactly why I hit the road to take a tour of America’s heartland. I needed to do more “boots on the ground” research on these new AI factories to understand the next revolution in AI.

See, these locations are strategic. They all have two things in common: large amounts of cheap land… and co-location with a power station that can provide a whole lot of cheap electricity.

Thanks to fiber-optic networks that can connect these data centers to the world at the speed of light, these buildings can be constructed just about anywhere. They are part of the “cloud” – an amorphous industry word used to simply explain a data center located just about anywhere on Earth.

If it’s “in the cloud,” that doesn’t mean it’s up there in the sky somewhere. It’s right here on Earth, surrounded by green fields of corn and soy. It’s about as real as it gets.

The latest explosion in data center construction is grounded not by pie-in-the-sky projections but in hardcore necessities. It’s founded in the physics and software needed to create AI.

The story that has captured the media’s attention has been the torrid competition taking place in real time to create the best-performing large language model (LLM).

LLMs, in a nutshell, are machine learning models that can comprehend and generate human language text.

OpenAI kicked off the race in November 2022 with its release of ChatGPT.

Since then, new LLM models have been popping up out of cornfields every couple of months.

The latest round of LLMs is remarkable. The next evolution of AI is here.

That’s why I held a special presentation last night. In it, I shared the little-known small caps that stand to benefit from this seismic AI shift the most – and which ones to avoid like the plague.

Click here to watch a replay of last night’s event.

Regards,

Jeff Brown
Founder, Brownstone Research