DI August 2026

Another chance to profit from AI’s latest bottleneck

“We taught sand to think.” In this month’s issue Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen recently said this on From the beach to the data center “The Joe Rogan Experience.” No other single quote captures the scale of what we’re actually doing when we Every bubble in history died the talk about the artificial intelligence (AI) buildout. same way We take silicon —the same grains of sand under your The dominant supplier behind AI’s feet at the beach —melt it, purify it, grow it into crystals, shift to light and slice it into wafers. We etch patterns into those wafers so tiny they’re measured in atoms. The copper wall: How AI broke the old plumbing Then we repeat the steps 1,000X over, until we have warehouses stacked with silicon wafers. From telecom roadkill to AI choke point Run power through at exactly the right voltages, and the sand can reason through problems… write How LITE fits into our portfolio software… and make connections in research that no human has ever made. Key prices

S&P 500 7,736.52 Computers have been able to process calculations for decades, ever since we first crafted the computer chip. 1-Month (Gain) +3.16% But before AI, computers didn’t actually “think.” Nasdaq 26,213.72

A spreadsheet can’t reason through problems. A Word 1-Month (Gain) +1.42% document just holds your thoughts. You still have to Russell 2000 3,036.98 write them. Pre -ChatGPT, computers were just tools. We still had to do the work. 1-Month (Gain) +0.42% Dollar Index 99.88 The latest AI models can work for more than 12 hours straight on their own. And that duration is doubling 1-Month (Loss ) -1.28% every few months. US 10-Year Yield 4.623%

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Set them on a task like coding a website or experimenting with new medicine formulas, and they’ll plan out the work, break tasks into separate subtasks, work through them, spot their own errors, and start over on their own. No human needed.

All that from sand and electricity.

From the beach to the data center

To see AI’s “sand story” in action, look no further than our own portfolio…

“Semi -cap” stocks build the machines that shape the sand. Making a single AI chip takes hundreds of individual steps, and if a single step goes wrong, the chip is useless.

Each of these steps needs machines that work at atom -level precision, from laying down silicon layers to inspecting the finished silicon wafers before they become finished chips. And the more steps in the process, the more equipment you need.

We built our semi -cap “ETF” to capture four separate layers of this process.

Chipmakers like Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM) are upgrading their factories to make the most complex AI chips. Buy just one semi -cap stock, and we’d miss out on the full wave of spending on all the equipment these chipmakers need.

TSM is the one actually shaping sand. And it’s the chip sector’s ultimate gatekeeper. About 70% of the chips that end up in AI data centers started as wafers in TSM’s foundries. But a wafer still has a few more steps before it becomes a brain.

Those wafers leave Taiwan and become Nvidia (NVDA) GPUs. Nvidia is TSM’s largest customer, and it’s the company that turns shaped sand into the chips that actually “think.”

Nvidia’s chips run essentially every frontier AI model on the planet. But the processor can only think as fast as the memory chips that supply the data. Micron Technology’s (MU) high - bandwidth memory is designed to do exactly that.

Broadcom (AVGO) and Arista Networks (ANET) wire that thinking together. Astera Labs (ALAB) keeps the signals clean as they travel between chips. Vertiv Holdings (VRT) keeps the whole thing powered and cool enough to stay online.

Every stock in our Disruption Investor portfolio is a link in the same chain.

On the scale of human history, there are only a handful of moments like this one. AI is a civilization upgrade on the same level as fire, the wheel, and electricity.

August 2026 | Page 2 A RiskHedge Publication