BlackRock has bet on "picks and shovels" for the AI marketplace

Investment giant BlackRock has named the companies that provide the foundation of the artificial intelligence ecosystem as the most reliable beneficiaries of the current technology cycle. While technology giants are engaged in an aggressive struggle for supremacy, the most predictable income will come not from developers of chatbots and neural networks, but from suppliers of equipment and resources, the world's largest investment company is convinced.

The current boom in capital investment in AI is a classic "pick and shovel trade", the potential of which has not yet been exhausted, said Ben Powell, chief investment strategist of BlackRock in the Asia-Pacific region, to CNBC. The economist used a popular Wall Street reference to the days of the gold rush, when not gold miners, but sellers of picks and shovels received the most stable and large income.

According to Powell, the largest cloud service providers - hyperscalers - are now acting on a winner-take-all logic and behaving as if being second rather than first will actually squeeze them out of the market. This pushes companies to spend enormously, regardless of the risks of overspending. The BlackRock strategist noted that bigtechs are just beginning to borrow from the credit markets to fund the next phase of AI expansion. "The big companies are just starting to probe the ground in the credit markets... it seems like they can do a lot more there," he suggested.

The BlackRock strategist emphasized that much of that cash flow will not go toward AI model developers, but to a wide range of AI vendors, from chip makers to energy companies to copper wiring suppliers. Powell expects the stocks of these particular companies to show "positive surprises" in 2026.

Another investment giant - Fidelity - holds positions in the shares of hyperscalers with stable profit growth, such as Alphabet and Meta Platforms, as well as in the securities of suppliers of complex server solutions and memory - Broadcom, Marvell Technology and Micron. The investment company pays special attention to the industrial and energy sectors, which provide the growing needs of data centers in electricity and air-conditioning systems. Among the favorites of Fidelity's portfolio managers are manufacturers of gas turbines and electrical equipment (GE Vernova, Eaton), air conditioning systems (Trane Technologies) and gas infrastructure operators (Energy Transfer), The Street writes.

Fidelity notes that the investment focus is shifting from individual processor developers to server system manufacturers. The investment firm also holds a large position in Nvidia - not only as the "gold standard" of processors for AI training, but also as a company that has evolved from a chip developer to a supplier of "full-fledged server systems - in essence, supercomputers," according to Fidelity.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor