The goods to purchase in order to profit from AI

Nick Lawson says the AI revolution will be driven by commodities

Here, he outlines the materials you should purchase in order to earn money.

An old tale about a factory that comes to a complete stop. It takes days for engineers to diagnose the equipment. A specialist is eventually summoned. The plant roars back to life as he walks the floor, listens, and taps a single screw. One screw tightened, 1 is what his invoice states. 9,999, knowing which screw.

The current investment issue is that. There is a lot of noise coming from the fourth Industrial Revolution, nearly all of which is focused on software, platforms, and artificial intelligence. The golden screw, which powers the entire machine, is located somewhere else. It is located in the materials layer of commodities.

James Watt did not win the first Industrial Revolution. The Darby family, whose coke-fired furnace at Coalbrookdale made the steam engine scalable, and Matthew Boulton, who supplied the capital and the manufacturing base, won it. Those who controlled the refining, owned the feedstock, and waited for the world to need what they hadsuch as Sheffield steel, Coalbrookdale iron, town gas infrastructure, and canalswere the beneficiaries of the 18th and 19th centuries. The owners of the enabling layer were the ones who compounded; the inventors were praised.

Below, the article continues.

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Scarcity is found in commodities.

Now we are at the same time. The fourth Industrial Revolution's software layer is quickly becoming commoditized. Although capital-intensive, the hardware layer, chips, data centers, and power systems can be replicated. In a long-term stagflationary environment, pricing power is everything, and scarcity resides in the materials layer. For 2026, we are concentrating on uranium, tungsten, helium, and, ironically, coal as the golden screws.

The primary fuel of the AI era is uranium. Intermittent renewable energy sources cannot consistently supply the baseload power needed by data centers. The US, UK, France, Japan, South Korea, Poland, and the UAE are all accelerating their reactor-building programs. Conversion and enrichment are the crucial bottlenecks, not mining.

The opportunity lies throughout the entire value chain, including conversion, enrichment, fuel fabrication, and the qualification of non-Russian fuel for Soviet-era reactors throughout Eastern Europe. The Western world's reliance on Russian enrichment capacity is a strategic liability that is currently being addressed at great expense. The spot price cycle is still in its infancy. Utility and producer term contracts have only partially repriced.

Why tungsten is the Sheffield steel of today.

In its main uses, such as cutting tools, weapons, superalloys, and equipment used in the production of semiconductors, tungsten cannot be replaced. With export restrictions, China has demonstrated its willingness and ability to weaponize its control over 80% of the world's supply. Primary production in the West is very small. The defense industry has inelastic and structural demand. A demand cycle spanning ten years is fueled by NATO's rearmament.

The real opportunity lies in the refining bottleneck, the production of ammonium paratungstate (APT), the primary industrial intermediate and global benchmark for tungsten pricing. The APT capacity in the West is almost zero. Because Sheffield was in charge of specialty steel refining in the 1780s, it dominated precision metalworking worldwide. Today's Sheffield steel is tungsten.

Helium is priced far below its strategic significance, irreplaceable, and non-renewable on any practical timeline. It is necessary for semiconductor lithography, rocket propulsion, magnetic resonance imaging, and quantum computing cooling. The US government reserve, which supported the world's supply for many years, is being depleted. The market has already become more competitive due to disruptions in Russian supplies. The infrastructure for liquefaction and purification, which is the golden screw of the helium value chain and is still in its infancy, capital-intensive, and very challenging to quickly replicate, is where the value is found, not extraction.

Since coal, especially metallurgical coal, is the most stigmatized asset in the world of investments, it is also one of the most intriguing. Though far away, green steel is real. Until at least 2040, blast-furnace steel will continue to be the most popular material for structural and infrastructure applications.

Environmental and social governance (ESG)-driven divestment has concentrated ownership among private operators with longer time horizons and lower capital costs, depriving the asset class of new supply as demand from Africa, Southeast Asia, and India keeps rising. The British parallel is instructive: coal was the hated fuel of the impoverished in the 1780s. It served as the empire's foundation within 40 years.

All of this is amplified by the macro context. Regardless of the intentions of central banks, the combination of fiscal excess and supply constraints is structurally inflationary, and we are in a regime where rates remain higher for longer.

In this situation, exposure to passive indexes will not protect capital. The right stance is genuine conviction, expressed with focus in companies with pricing power, tangible assets, or irreplaceable niches. As liquidity mismatches emerge, private-credit stress, which is already apparent, will increase. The Yale endowment model, which was designed for a world with declining rates and plenty of liquidity, is inappropriate in this one.

Investors who are aware of this are not placing a risky wager. Owning the feedstock, controlling refining, and waiting for the world to need what you have is the same wager that created the great fortunes of the 18th and 19th centuries.