The "Hardware Trade" in AI looks crowded. Our data shows smart money rotating into "Boring" Infrastructure. What are you buying?

I run a research desk that scans and evaluates roughly 100+ investment pitches per week from across the open web (Substack, blogs, forums). For the last 18 months, the AI related flow was mostly hardware: Nvidia, AMD, and pick-and-shovel chip plays. But recently, I’ve noticed a rotation in the pitches we review. The "Hardware" pitch has almost vanished or looks priced for perfection. Instead, the high-quality pitches are moving entirely to **Second-Order Effects -** specifically **"Sustainment" vs. "Creation."** I wanted to throw this out to the community to see if you're seeing the same shift in your screens. **Here is the thesis we are seeing:** **1. The "Powered Land" Trade (Energy)** The bottleneck is no just chips - it’s also electricity. We’re seeing a surge in pitches for small-cap energy companies - not as "oil plays," but as "grid proxies." Basically, companies that own land with signed interconnection agreements (waiting lists are 4-6 years in PJM/ERCOT). The bet is that Data Centers will pay a massive premium just to skip the line. **2. AI-Native "Boring" Services** The other trend is applying AI to unsexy, high-cash-flow industries. * **Example:** Flood Insurance. We reviewed a pitch for a Private/Public insurer that uses ML to price flood risk property-by-property, rather than using FEMA maps. They pick the good risks, leave the bad ones to the state, and run loss ratios half the industry average. **The Question:** It feels like the market is done paying for "promises" (LLMs, Chips) and is starting to pay for the utilities that keep the lights on (Power, Insurance, Grid Infra). * Are you guys still holding the Semis/Hardware winners? * Or are you rotating into these "Second-Order" infrastructure plays? * What other "boring" industries are you seeing AI fix right now? Would love to hear where you guys are hunting.