Dad. RGA Investment Advisors. Soundview Equity Partners. GARP investor. Mets, Jets, Isles fan. Compulsive reader. In awe of nature. Co-host @twiii_podcast.
Stamford, CT
Joined December 2008
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Incredible new episode with Doug O'Laughlin of @fabknowledge and @SemiAnalysis_!!
On how the semi industry is leading AI forward, the winners of the AI race, an intriguing investment opp in the newest bottleneck for the industry & the deep recession in the non-AI semi world.
.@ElliotTurn and @mihaljevic welcome Doug O'Laughlin of SemiAnalysis and Fabricated Knowledge. Doug shares insights into semiconductors, how the industry leads AI forward, AI winners, opportunity in an industry bottleneck, and the non-AI semi recession.
podbean.com/eas/pb-m8t6a-17c…
Really excited for this with @peter_mantas at @manualofideas!
I will be in Chicago next Wednesday (w/ @inflectionecon) to have a fireside chat with @ElliotTurn on the opportunity at present in biopharma and life science tools for generalist investors.
Will be a fun chat so don't miss out!
Elliot Turner retweeted
I will be in Chicago next Wednesday (w/ @inflectionecon) to have a fireside chat with @ElliotTurn on the opportunity at present in biopharma and life science tools for generalist investors.
Will be a fun chat so don't miss out!
Elliot Turner retweeted
Have been thinking about this as well. We've all had a front-row seat to the discussions and debates around the buildout, but once you get to use cases, the debate is fixated on coding and personal agents and drops off thereafter. Not as much around where broader enterprise adoption is. Found that surprising, especially because you need real enterprise adoption for any of this stuff to matter 5 years from now.
I picked up coverage of software, compute, and, power earlier this year and it was pretty jarring how far apart the software company debates were from and compute/power/semis/labs discourse.
If you follow the traditional SaaS businesses, especially the big system-of-record guys, it's clear that for most, real adoption and usage of AI products sold by the SaaS space is a late 2027 event at the earliest. $NOW and $TEAM are quickly realizing that they need to deploy engineers to customer sites like $PLTR. Both are telling investors to expect little to no revenue upside from customers using enough tokens to generate an overage beyond contracts. The "AI benefits" are contract expansions/upselling to plans that include it, an effort that companies seemingly believe must precede driving usage. Messy/noisy.
Then, if one looks at the infra SaaS players ($SNOW etc.), most of them aren't "benefitting from AI" the way you're thinking - they've just found new customers that spend at lot of money with them today. On the enterprise side, what you're seeing is not a big wave of AI usage demand, it's a big acceleration in cloud migrations that enterprises believe make them more "AI-ready". Migrations are often multi-year in nature. Cyber has elements of this as well.
Taken together, the logical reaction is "this means air pocket in 2027", but it's not like labs/the current apps aren't still growing rapidly, it's not 100% clear we're out of the woods on scarcity/buildout just yet, and some companies are farther along with their AI product launches than others.
That said, "air pocket" sounds scarier than it is. Think that's mostly because it implies deceleration, and it today like 80%+ of tech companies across both software + semis have a decelerating topline (most from growth rates that are attractive) and markets are punishing that right now.
In SW, it seems to be creating a lot of GARP-y profiles that are attractive in cases where one believes that terminal value is not going to 0. Patience while holding something cheap + durably growthy for a year gets rewarded in 2028+ with the benefits of acceleration etc.
Part of why I've been thinking about this is our belief that at some point AI needs a handoff from the "infrastructure layer" to the "application layer."
The value stops accruing to the component manufacturers as new tech powers new, previously unfathomable businesses.
I'm not sure that's all that different. The hyperscalers and frontier labs are not in my AI index here. I think those building recurring revenue streams are incomparable with those who supply to the buildout. This could be a very advantageous moment in time for $GOOG $AMZN $META
I'll miss you $ROKU but think about you every time I watch TV! What an absolutely wild ride it's been. Quite lucrative but incredibly turbulent.
I hope the lessons learned end up more valuable than the investment itself, as there are many!
Elliot Turner retweeted
The half-life of recent bubbles is about one year.
My thinking so far is that peak DC investment is tricky for a lot of bottleneck companies & the winners will be those who can provably take share w/in the DC rather than those who ride the wave. It's much tricker & the absence is painful even for the future winners.
I couldn't get the thought out of my head so I had to map it out.
This chart shows the COVID winners from April 2020-Dec 31 2021 plotted against the AI Bottleneck 40 from April 2025-today.
Look at the overlay and look at the correlations, it's jaw-dropping!
Data centers development will be just fine, except for people who are cavalier with rules, regulations and the health/safety/environment of local towns in their own buildouts.
Stated another way, this is worse for 1 guy than everyone else in the ecosystem.
Hinojosa is quite clear here. DCs aren't going to be stopped, but the people want reasonable regulations in place that require certain protections.
nitter.cf/firesidealpha/status/2…
Gina Hinojosa says she would issue a moratorium on all *new* Texas data centers until the legislature passes protections
“What I would do is pass laws to protect people. That’s the way this works. Right? It’s not promises that can be broken November 4th, the day after the election. It’s about passing laws to protect Texans."
"That’s what I’ve called on this governor to do, to call a special session, an emergency special session. He has the sole power to do it. He refuses to do it. He’s received $20 million from data center interests."
"I would issue a moratorium on any new data centers until the legislature can pass laws to protect Texans."
"Everything from water to electricity, jobs, all of it. Right? Making sure we have guardrails when it comes to AI. This is what AI is for. This is what it is not for."
"I just had a press conference yesterday where I denounced Greg Abbott’s plan to convert 100 schools in Houston into AI schools, a model in which teachers are replaced by education guides. This is experimenting on our kids. Parents don’t want this."
"Kids spend enough time on screens, yet this is how big tech makes more money. And Greg Abbott is in the pockets of the big tech donors. So we just need some basic protections and guardrails in law. That’s how this works.”
People are overcomplicating the analysis. He's incompetent, full of terrible ideas, blatantly corrupt and he worked as hard as possible to prove that this time around.
He's also incredibly "unpresidential" to a degree no sitcom could ever have contemplated.
RFK gonna be gone by the end of the year. NIH budget never gonna go down again (ok maybe one day, but a long time from now).
Romney vs Ossoff/Shapiro and let's move past this national nightmare.
Elliot Turner retweeted
Bad policy, bad character make bad politics: erratic tariffs, impulsive Iran war, blanket pardons, apparent corruption, weaponized justice, ICE brutality, mountainous deficits, hiding Epstein, abandoning allies and coddling enemies. Hoping for a course correction, for the country and for my party.
Maximally wrong with maximal swagger. Can’t wait to see how this fits the 5d chess.
A Republican sweep was all but assured today.
Not because of how bad polling is. Not because of how bad Dem candidates are. Not because of how easily betting markets are manipulated. Nor because of how broken economic sentiment trackers are.
It’s because this admin has a plan.
This admin is aware that we are at a pivotal juncture in the history of this country.
We have to get AI right.
We have to decouple from China. Not the U.S. from China. The collective west has to be torn away completely.
We need to crush Canada to show the Europeans what it costs to step out of line.
We need to re-industrialize *before* robotics starts to ramp.
We need to regime change Iran *before* drones become a lot more lethal with onboard AI.
We need to regime change left-leaning South American countries *before* Europe attempts to say no when we force them to decouple from China.
And if Trump is a lame duck for two years navigating any of this will be impossible.
And because the actions that lead to the current point are only rational if there is a decoupling plan at the end of all this the only conclusion one can make is that the admin is far more sanguine about today’s results than literally everyone else.
And because wall st is terrible at framing and betting on unquantifiable scenarios.
And because I have closely observed how the pollsters and pundits have attempted to model elections.
And because I understand the economic divergence that has occurred between Dems and repubs under this admin.
I feel perfectly comfortable putting my reputation on the line.
Because if I’m wrong I’m not just wrong about elections. I’m probably also wrong about the strategic capacity of the current admin.
And if they didn’t put sufficient thought into navigating the midterms all is lost anyways.
Republican sweep. Decoupling next. Never blackpill.
🫡
How is not having a plan a consequence of this? It's a cause.
There never was a plan, just incompetence and corruption amok.
Lmao 😭
Well this is awkward (and humiliating).
I fucked up. No excuses. No equivocations.
I predicted a Republican sweep and that did not occur. Polling was not broken. Mea Culpa.
This in turn drastically reduces the odds the admin has a plan and obviously implies that even if they have a plan the execution has been horribly sub-optimal to put it mildly.
Feel free to unfollow - no hard feelings at all.
As promised I’m going to take a thirty day hiatus and will probably refrain from making election predictions for the foreseeable future.
Feel free to also clown me or gloat in the comments - I’ll read all of them - although I won’t be responding as I will be virtually incarcerated🫡