There is an old saying about gold rushes: the people who reliably get rich are not the prospectors but the ones selling picks and shovels. The AI boom has its own version of this truth. While attention focuses on the labs building flashy models, some of the clearest financial winners have been the companies supplying the hardware everyone needs. Their soaring revenues are one of the most telling signals of where the market really is.

The Suppliers Who Sell to Everyone

Whatever model wins, whatever app goes viral, it almost certainly runs on specialised chips from a small group of suppliers. That position — selling the essential ingredient to every competitor at once — has translated into dramatic revenue growth for the leading hardware makers. They profit regardless of which AI products succeed, which is a far safer bet than picking individual winners.

Why This Pattern Repeats

Picks-and-shovels dynamics show up in every technology wave, from railways to the internet. The infrastructure layer captures value early and steadily, because it is a prerequisite for everything built above it. In AI, that layer is compute hardware today, but it also includes cloud platforms, data tooling and the services that make models usable. Following the infrastructure is often more revealing than following the headlines.

The Lesson for Marketers

You are not buying chips, but the principle still applies to how you read the market. The most durable value in any boom tends to sit with the enablers — the tools and platforms that everyone needs regardless of trends. When choosing where to invest your own time and budget, favour the dependable infrastructure of your workflow over whatever is briefly fashionable. Foundations outlast fads.

Following the Value, Not the Hype

The picks-and-shovels lens is ultimately about discipline. In a noisy market full of bold claims, the question worth asking is always: what does everyone here actually need to succeed? The answers — reliable compute, solid data, dependable platforms — point to where durable value sits. Apply the same thinking to your own decisions, and you will spend less time chasing whatever is trending and more time building on foundations that will still be standing when the current excitement fades.

Source: Our World in Data — Artificial Intelligence.