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In today’s post:
🛸 The $40B War You Can't See
😬 Trump's $600M Bitcoin Bloodbath
🤯 Micron Just Bet $250B
Same AI software. Wildly different results.
Every company in this dataset bought the same AI capabilities. The difference in results came down to one thing: whether someone inside CX owned it.
One beauty retailer made 202 workflow updates in 30 days — refining as policies changed and new questions came in. Companies without a named owner saw performance stall or decline.
Read the data on what separates AI deployments that work from the ones that stall, and the four questions worth asking before your next AI investment.
🛸 The $40B War You Can't See
Drone warfare used to mean surveillance. A fancy camera with wings.
Now? It's loitering munitions and kamikaze UAVs reshaping every modern battlefield.
Ukraine's Fire Point swarms are turning Russian refineries into bonfires. Israel and Hezbollah are trading drone strikes. And Iran's Shahed drones have been terrorizing shipping in the Strait of Hormuz during the U.S. military operation.
How we got here
Suicide drones aren't new. The U.S. Navy tried it in WWII with the TDR-1, then again in Korea with repurposed Hellcats.
The problem? 1940s cameras and radios were heavy, fragile, expensive, and easier to jam than a Sunday crossword.
So for decades, militaries went with cruise missiles instead. One-way weapons, big price tags.
That changed in the 1990s when Israel started selling its IAI Harpy abroad. Still, most countries (looking at you, America) stuck with expensive reusable drones like the Predator and Reaper through the 2000s and 2010s.
Why kamikaze drones are winning now
Modern suicide drones like SpektreWorks' LUCAS are becoming a U.S. arsenal staple. Here's the pitch:
Cheap. You can launch swarms of them to overwhelm enemy defenses. Try doing that with cruise missiles without bankrupting a small nation.
Patient. They loiter for minutes or hours, hunting moving or hidden targets. Some can even be recalled mid-flight. A missile with an undo button.
Sneaky. They fly low and dodge radar.
Low maintenance. No specialized trucks, ships, or bombers needed. Cruise missiles are a whole logistics operation. Drones just... go.
Defense is the new offense
NATO is pivoting hard. At this week's summit in Ankara, it launched the "Drone Edge" initiative:
$40B+ into counter-drone capabilities over five years
5x more drone operators trained across armed forces by end of 2027
And that's just the warm-up. Next on the menu: AI-driven swarming, subsea-to-air vehicles, laser interception networks, and 3D-printed munitions.
The battlefield of the future is being printed, coded, and launched by the thousand.
Robot wars are here. How are you feeling?
Claude vs Gemini. OpenAI vs Anthropic. Which lab ships next? Real money on all of it. Kalshi is the CFTC-regulated prediction market for tech readers. Trade what you know.
Everyone panicked when Meta announced it was selling GPU compute.
Smart money read the fine print and started buying.
There's an AI infrastructure company that just got sold off on news that doesn't actually touch its business. While the market dumped it, Microsoft has a $9.7 billion contract with it. Nvidia signed for another $3.4 billion. Total locked-in contracted revenue: $3.1 billion a year, on multi-year deals.
For context, the company did $740 million in revenue this year. Consensus says that hits $3 billion next year. That's over 305% growth, already under contract.
This isn't a story stock hoping demand shows up. Demand already signed. The company controls 5 gigawatts of secured power in a market where power, not chips, is the real shortage. Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Nvidia are all fighting over it.
The screens say it's expensive at 21.6x sales. Our analysis shows why that multiple compresses to 4.7x in a single year if management hits its timeline.
And the first major proof point lands in the coming quarters. Miss the re-rate, and you're buying it 40% higher with everyone else.
In today's Premium+ deep dive, we break down:
Why the Meta selloff hit the wrong business model (and which stocks it actually hurts)
The quiet $3.4B-linked acquisition the market completely ignored
The exact milestones that trigger the re-rate, in order
The one execution risk that would kill the thesis, and how to spot it early
😬 Trump's $600M Bitcoin Bloodbath
American Bitcoin Corp $ABTC ( ▲ 2.05% ), co-founded by Eric Trump, has cratered more than 95% from its peak.
That wipeout erased over $600M from Eric's stake in just 10 months, per Bloomberg.
How bad is it?
Bad enough that the company just did a 1-for-15 reverse stock split to keep its Nasdaq listing alive.
That's the stock market equivalent of taping 15 soggy dollar bills together and calling it a crisp new note.
The stock hit an all-time low Wednesday before bouncing 2.8% premarket to $6.02. Bitcoin itself is down 30% YTD.
Here's the kicker.
Other Bitcoin miners saw the crypto winter coming and pivoted. Riot, Cipher, MARA, and TeraWulf started leasing their computing power to AI data centers.
Wall Street loved it. Those four are up an average of 60%+ this year.
American Bitcoin? Stuck with pure crypto mining. Shares plunged 77% over the same stretch.
Same industry. Same market. One group read the room, the other doubled down.
And doubling down they are.
Eric Trump (who owns roughly 6% and serves as chief strategy officer) says the company won't sell its Bitcoin unless things get "beyond catastrophic."
They actually bought 500 more BTC on Monday.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump reported at least $1.4B in crypto earnings last year. Retail investors holding Trump-affiliated tokens and ABTC shares? Not exactly sharing in the spoils.
Diamond hands are cool until they're holding a falling knife.
American Bitcoin is down 95% and still buying more BTC. What do you call that?
🤯 Micron Just Bet $250B
The memory chip giant is boosting its U.S. investment plans to $250 billion through 2035, up from the $200 billion it promised back in June.
Why the extra $50 billion? Two words: AI demand.
Every chatbot, every AI model, every data centre needs memory. Lots of it. And Micron wants to be the one selling the shovels.
The goal is simple: make 40% of its DRAM on American soil.
The announcement dropped as Micron poured the first concrete at its new fab in Clay, New York. A milestone that arrived a full quarter ahead of schedule.
A construction project finishing early? In this economy? Someone check the simulation.
The government is loving it. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick says the project will create nearly 100,000 jobs and lock in leading-edge memory supply inside the U.S.
But wait, there's more.
Micron is also throwing up to $3 billion at strengthening the U.S. chip supply chain, including:
$500M in financing for Taiwan's GlobalWafers to build out its silicon wafer plant in Sherman, Texas
A 10-year supply deal guaranteeing Micron access to the raw wafers it needs
Plans to team up on next-gen wafer tech down the line
Think of it like a bakery buying a stake in the flour mill. Control the ingredients, control the bread.
One catch: the GlobalWafers deal still needs final agreements and the usual regulatory rubber stamps.
Markets liked what they heard. Micron $MU ( ▲ 4.52% ) shares jumped about 6% premarket on the news and finished the day up 4.5%
Turns out "we're spending $250 billion because demand is insane" is exactly what investors want to hear.