“The smartest investors look beyond the obvious choices, like hyper-scalers, and are thinking outside the usual suspects.”

Chamath Palihapitiya is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian and American venture capitalist, entrepreneur, and former tech executive.

He is best known for his early leadership role at Facebook, founding the investment firm Social Capital, popularizing the Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) boom, and co-hosting the popular tech and business broadcast, the All-In Podcast.

Like Chamath Palihapitiya, the smartest investors look beyond the obvious choices and are thinking outside the usual suspects. More specifically, -Palihapitiya is thinking about the nuts and bolts required to build a data center or design a graphics processing unit (GPU) from the ground up.

Palihapitiya’s grand prediction for 2026 is to invest in precious metals — specifically, he calls out copper as his asset of choice.

Why is copper important for AI?

One of the biggest pain points from rising AI investment lies in the power grid. According to a study from the Pew Research Center, data centers consumed 4% of the total electricity in the U.S. in 2024. By 2030, data center electricity consumption is expected to rise by more than 130% from current levels.

As AI workloads grow, training and inferencing protocols become even more mission-critical. Clusters of GPUs inside data centers are only going to continue to push the limits of power loads. This paradigm is what makes copper so valuable.

Copper is a conductive material — manifesting on every chip and server rack through which electricity is moving. As hyperscalers continue to accelerate capital expenditures (capex), expect additional capital to be allocated to both chip procurement and energy infrastructure in the coming years. In fact, it’s already seeing this play out.

Source: Billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya Says This Is the Best Artificial Intelligence (AI) Investment for 2026 (Hint: It’s Not Even a Stock) | The Motley Fool, https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/01/20/billionaire-chamath-palihapitiya-says-this-is-the/

What you don’t know can cost you.

What you choose to learn can change your life.

Knowledge empowers you to see value where others don’t, make wiser choices, and create better opportunities. Keep learning—it always pays off.

Wall Street Journal / David G. Santry / April 20, 1981

A must-read Warren Buffett letter on inflation investing

“In the 16 years since present management assumed responsibility for Berkshire, book value per share with insurance-held equities valued at market has increased from $19.46 to $400.80, or 20.5% compounded annually. (You’ve done better: The value of the mineral content in the human body compounded at 22% annually during the past decade.)” Such is the inimitable style with which Chairman Warren E. Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. writes his annual letter to shareholders, which appears, along with details of his investment acumen (table), in the recently issued annual report of the conglomerate that he runs from Omaha.

Buffett, 50, is widely regarded as one of America’s finest investors. Clearly, he is also one of the most penetrating observers of the country’s business and financial scene. Year in and year out, Buffett’s shareholder letters have been carefully read by investors. This year’s letter should be no exception. It deals with, among other things, accounting, inflation, and the property and casualty insurance industry.

Berkshire, being basically an insurance company, makes investments in other companies. Generally, if Berkshire owns less than 20% of a company, it can include in its earnings only dividends received on the stock. Says Buffett: “Many of these companies pay out relatively small proportions of their earnings in dividends. This means that only a small proportion of their current earning power is recorded in our own current operating earnings.” Buffett explains that the portion of earnings not paid out in dividends by the companies last year exceeded Berkshire’s total reported operating earnings. Conventional accounting allows “less than half of our earnings ‘iceberg’ to appear above the surface,” he says.

Stock repurchases. “We would rather have earnings for which we did not get accounting credit put to good use in a 10%-owned company by a management we did not hire,” says Buffett, “than have earnings for which we did get credit put into projects of more dubious potential. . . . Our insurance companies will continue to make large investments in well-run, favorably situated, noncontrolled companies that pay out in dividends only a small portion of their earnings. We would expect our long-term return to continue to exceed the return derived annually from reported operating earnings.”

One use of retained earnings that Buffett favors is a company’s repurchase of its own shares. “If a fine business is selling in the marketplace for far less than intrinsic value, what more certain or more profitable utilization of capital can there be than significant enlargement of the interests of all owners at that bargain price? . . . The auction nature of security markets often allows finely run companies the opportunity to buy portions of their own businesses at a price under 50% of that needed to acquire the same earnings power through the negotiated acquisition of another enterprise,” he says.

Inflation, however, makes investing all the more difficult, according to Buffett. “High rates of inflation create a tax on capital that makes much corporate investment unwise. . . . At present inflation rates, we believe individual owners in medium or high tax brackets should expect no real long-term return from the average American corporation. The average return on equity of corporations is fully offset by the combination of implicit tax on capital levied by inflation and explicit taxes levied on dividends and gains in value produced by retained earnings.”

Lost options. Buffett also has some sober thoughts on the property and casualty insurance business, which is in a down phase of its underwriting cycle. He takes issue with those in the industry who minimize the problem of having huge amounts of bonds in their portfolios that are selling below cost (page 98). Indeed, many large companies have no net worth when bond holdings are valued at the current market price. Yet many in the industry say that as long as the bonds do not have to be sold, there is no problem. Buffett contends that under such circumstances investment options disappear, perhaps for decades. “When large underwriting losses are in prospect, it may make excellent business logic for some insurers to shift from tax-exempt into taxable bonds,” he says. “Unwillingness to recognize major bond losses may be the sole factor that prevents such a sensible move.”

But unrealized bond losses have other serious consequences. The losses can force a company into disastrous price-cutting just to maintain cash flow to invest at current high rates of interest while hoping for an improvement in underwriting and bonds.

Still, owing to Buffett’s investing, Berkshire prospered in 1980. Operating earnings increased 16% to $41.9 million, and Berkshire’s return on equity was 17.8%. Net earnings per share, including investment gains, jumped 24% to $51.72. Berkshire’s performance is reflected in its stock, which recently traded at $495 a share, a premium over book value. In 1977, the shares traded at $82. (Buffett owns nearly half of Berkshire’s 1 million shares.)

Buffett does not pretend to be an oracle. He writes: “Short-term forecasts of stock or bond prices are useless. The forecasts may tell you a great deal about the forecaster; they tell you nothing about the future.”

Berkshire’s stock portfolio

Thousands of dollars

<small>Data: Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s 1980 annual report</small>

102 BUSINESS WEEK: April 20, 1981 FINANCE