Inside today’s Daily Journal…

Today, Porter turns the Journal over to his good friend, George Gilder of The Gilder Report… George reveals what his research is showing – who the real winners from the buildout taking place in artificial intelligence are.

Here’s George now…

There is a growing panic in 2026 about artificial intelligence (“AI”) and the push toward artificial general intelligence (“AGI”) as well as machines that can supposedly think completely like humans.

Industry tech giants are even asking for government regulations to control the “dire threats” these systems supposedly pose. But an economic and scientific reality check is overdue…

The concept that AI will soon surpass human intelligence is built on a misunderstanding of how the brain works. Modern AI relies heavily on “left-brain” functions: logic, historical data, and massive language models. It assumes the future will simply be an extension of the past. Human intelligence, however, relies heavily on right-brain creativity, intuition, and imagination.

Medical history and, increasingly, quantum mechanics show that human consciousness isn’t just a product of brain cells reacting to logic – it transcends the physical brain entirely. Furthermore, the physical efficiency of the human mind is unmatched.

AI requires massive, multi-gigawatt data centers that consume enormous amounts of electricity. The human brain runs on just about 12 watts of power, yet it is capable of original discovery and true insight. Human minds are the ultimate innovators.

Instead of fearing that “sexless machines” will take over, we should look forward to human-driven breakthroughs, like 2D graphene and advanced microchips, that will disrupt past tech limitations and create superior investment returns.

Anticipated for a century, from John von Neuman’s warning about a coming singularity back in the 1930s to John McCarthy’s Dartmouth Conference in the spring of 1956 –predicting that AGI awaited merely a summer of concentrated work – AI represents the latest computer platform. Infatuating most computer science is the notion that AI can yield a mind, or even consciousness itself, superior to our own.

Transcending multi-gigawatt data centers, however, are the human minds that create them. With those mere dozen watts, the human mind is capable of insight, imagination, and discovery – humans launch all the gigawatt machines alleged to make humans obsolete.

Human minds are the only real quantum computers. In the face of the qubit counting race at near-zero Kelvin, in which Magnificent 7 apocalyptics predict various catastrophes from quantum computers, even Elon Musk’s solar convertors, battery walls, and Colossal data centers cannot yet compete with human brains and bodies with books on balmy beaches.

To the rise of purely analytical, left-brain mechanisms, humans bring right-brain imagination and creativity. The distinction originated in the 1960s with Nobelist Roger Sperry, who treated extreme epileptics by surgically severing the corpus callosum linking the two hemispheres of their brains. Subsequent experiments found language and logic chiefly on the left side, intuition and imagination on the right.

Further experience led neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, a speaker last year at my annual COSM conference, to conclude that consciousness transcends the brain almost entirely. In all his thousand-plus surgeries, depicted in his book Immortal Minds, he never found that his incisions in the brain eclipsed the consciousness of his patients. No matter how he manipulated their brain cells, they could always distinguish between the effects of his surgeries and their own consciousness of an autonomous identity.

Current AI experts and AGI cerebrations, in fact, seem to be denying the very existence of right brain functions. The logic and large language models (“LLM”) seem to dominate. Thus, they imagine that existing AI advances will continue into a trans-human future eclipsing human brains in a godlike “Singularity.”

But LLMs and retrospective logic systems assume the future will merely extrapolate past paradigms. AGI apocalyptics deny the long experience of surprising disruptions and new paradigms, such as the rise of wafer-scale integrated circuits and 2D graphene computers that we cover in our newsletters. Bearers of a new distributed and superabundant world, these breakthroughs point to investments with exponential returns.

Countering materialist superstitions is an incandescence of human consciousness and transcendence. To sandcastles of chips and chiplets, meshed amid mazes of wires and lasers, interposers and transceivers of codes, wrapped in tons of copper “sheaths,” we bring the majestic simplicities of wafer-scale and human scale.

To fears of carbon pollution, we offer a carbon solution of graphene and a vista of 2D transformations. In contrast to the sterile vision of sexless machines, we celebrate the full humanity of embodied minds, men and women thinking, creating, and discovering together.

Dashing human dreams of glory and divinity decades ago, pop-star physicist Carl Sagan told us that the multitude of stars in the universe outnumbers all the grains of sand on the world’s beaches. The Einstein “reality check” offers a different perspective: not fewer wonders, but more with each grain of sand itself a universe of possibility.

Advanced AI, even AGI, might be able to create a very highly attuned thinking and reasoning entity, even a brain of sorts, but it cannot create a being. That is what makes us human: being. Not the human, or the brain or the individual thinking part, but the being, and its connection to the greater whole, bestowed by the Creator. It is that which quantum physics is scratching at the surface of and of consciousness – of being – beyond the confines of an individual human brain.

Drawing on the work of topological physicist Jennifer Cano reveals the rich and intricate structure of matter at the smallest scales. We take a further step and celebrate each grain of sand as a gift of mind containing more electrons than the universe has stars and offering a silicon constellation of new possibilities for human realization and creativity in the image of our Creator.

The global semiconductor (microchip) industry is seeing historic growth. In March 2026, global sales reached $99.5 billion. This is an astounding 79.2% increase over March 2025. The Semiconductor Industry Association reports that global chip sales are firmly on track to hit $1 trillion for the full year 2026. Growth is surging worldwide, led by the Asia-Pacific region (up 108.5%) and the Americas (up 83.1%).

Microchips are the literal backbone of the modern economy, and demand is accelerating rapidly.

Investors often ask which company has the “best” AI model. This is the wrong question. The real bottleneck in AI right now is infrastructure: the physical data centers, high-performance memory, and cooling systems required to run complex AI programs. Running AI is vastly different from traditional software. In the past, once software was written, serving a new customer cost almost nothing. AI, however, requires constant, intense computing power and physical resources. As a result, software economics are shifting to look more like heavy infrastructure economics.

Four of the Magnificent 7 tech giants, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta, are currently locked in a massive spending war to build these data centers. Together, they are spending at an annualized rate of over half a trillion dollars. This massive cash drain is putting noticeable pressure on their free cash flow margins. Here is how these four giants currently stack up:

Nvidia (NVDA) is the most visible beneficiary… Nvidia is riding on the expansion of the AI platform. And that is a problem for its competitors. The faster AI infrastructure improves, the stronger Nvidia’s position may become. Cheaper compute, faster networking, and better orchestration expand the ecosystem.

The faster the AI ecosystem grows, the harder it becomes for competitors to reconstruct it from the outside… but this dynamic also increasingly benefits companies like Vertiv Holdings (VRT), whose cooling and power management systems are essential to sustaining high-density data centers.

Because these tech platforms are forced to spend aggressively just to stay competitive, the most reliable profits aren’t going to the platforms themselves. Instead, the guaranteed winners are the companies supplying the hardware, advanced packaging, and cooling systems needed to keep these giant data centers running.

The scale and persistence of capital expenditure confirm that demand for AI infrastructure is structural, not cyclical, creating a multi-year growth environment for semiconductor and infrastructure suppliers.

Until then!

George Gilder, Richard Vigilante, Steve Waite, John Schroeter, Dr. Robert Castellano

Editors, Gilder’s Guideposts, Technology Report, Technology Report Pro, Moonshots, and Private Reserve

Editor’s Note: Artificial Intelligence is about to leave your computer screen and embed itself directly into the physical world through a massive shift I call “Ambient AI.” This emerging market is projected to skyrocket from $20 billion to $1 trillion, and the entire movement will be powered by one tiny company. For months, I’ve been researching this specific $6 stock, which has spent 30 years perfecting the technology needed for this transition. Click here to claim your free briefing on this rare, under-the-radar opportunity.

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