By coinnews 
00:00 Speaker A
Nvidia has long been seen as the poster child for artificial intelligence, while streets seeing it as a pulse check on the health of the AI ecosystem. However, there is more to the AI trade of course that investors may be overlooking. DVX ventures, CEO John McNeal McNeal is joining us now with a closer look. And in addition to being in venture capital John, you all helped co-found an ETF that helps also look for these opportunities. So I guess, you know, Nvidia’s obviously dominated this trade along with a handful of other names. Before I ask you for specifics, I’m curious sort of how you’re framing it when you’re looking for these opportunities. What criteria are you using? What growth areas within AI are you looking at?
01:54 John McNeal
Yeah, during, uh, during my time at Tesla and Lift and and other stops in my career, I had some responsibility for building data centers. And so what we did was we took the build sheet of a data center, an AI data center, which is actually quite different than your regular data center. It’s got a lot more fiber and a lot more power, obviously. And, um, we took that build sheet and said, if you were going to build a stock portfolio out of this, what would it look like? And it turns out that Nvidia is a super small minority of what gets put into an AI data center. Um, and so we wanted to give investors access to what the real AI infrastructure, uh, profit pool is. And that includes everything from the power generation to the power electronics to the cooling to the substrates to the networking software that has all these chips talking to each other, etc. And so that’s really how we formulated, uh, the ETF called AIS.
03:54 Speaker A
And and walk me through that product, John. What what are some of the names in that in that vehicle in that product?
04:11 John McNeal
So you can imagine, uh, like I’ll just start from the power source. You’ve got, uh, GE Renovo and others who are providing the gas turbines that are powering these data centers. As you know, uh, the utilities and the grid can’t respond fast enough to demand. And so, uh, these large AI data data centers are finding their own sources of power and they’re putting that power in quickly and that’s in the form of natural gas turbines. Uh, then that connects to power electronics that transform that electricity so that the data center can use it. Uh, those are provided by companies like ABB. Uh, and then you come inside the data center and the data center, an AI data center has four times the fiber that a normal data center does. And Corning is a name, uh, that is really benefiting off of all that fiber. Uh, and then you’ve got, uh, network providers, substrate providers, uh, we have a list of about 60 stocks, uh, in the in the AIS ETF that contribute to that build of an AI data center and the profit pools that are within that.
06:27 Speaker A
And I’m curious when you’re thinking about your private investments as well, if you’re applying some of the same criteria, if you’re thinking about it in the same way.
06:53 John McNeal
Yeah, we tend to think about it in a holistic way and start to look at places that people don’t often, uh, don’t often look at first. And as you mentioned, uh, Nvidia gets a lot of the headlines here, as does Marvel and some of the other chip suppliers. Um, but when you when you open the aperture and say, who what really is involved in this super cycle of AI and the build out of the infrastructure around AI, then it really broadens to a whole different series of stocks that investors can, uh, can participate in and and participate in the super cycle. As we’ve seen through the last couple weeks of earnings, the large hyperscalers, Microsoft, Amazon, uh, Oracle, uh, etc. are all confirming their, uh, their previously announced AI infrastructure investments. So if this if anything, this is not slowing down, uh, and uh, in the long-term commitments remain, um, as the market is shifting to more and more demand in inferences as Jensen Wong referenced, uh, this week in his earnings.