McKinsey, Goldman, PwC and Gartner publish the forecasts. Almost nobody maps them to the layers that must be built first. That’s the part investors can underwrite.
2026 is enterprise scale: roughly $725B of infrastructure spend, with tokens acting like refined electricity. The spend flows through $NVDA, $AVGO and $TSM, then lands on power and land underneath: $IREN, $DGXX, $TE and $EOSE.
2027 is frontier reasoning. Whatever the date, the physical requirement is fixed: bigger clusters connected by light. Interconnect scales with cluster size, so the constraint relocates from power to bandwidth: $AAOI, $CRDO, $MU and $SNDK.
2028 is physical AI. Intelligence leaves the chat window and needs eyes, ears and autonomy stacks: $ONDS, $MRLN, $AMBA and $OUST, with $TSLA and Figure assembling bodies.
2030 is GDP transformation. Value migrates from infrastructure to merchants selling finished AI by the token, including $DOCN, $NET and $AKAM. By 2035, orbital coverage and sensing add another layer through $ASTS.
Forecasts slip, CAGRs are sell-side and AGI dates are guesses. What does not slip is that every stage requires the one before it. Own the layers, size for drawdowns, and remember: past performance is not a promise. DYOR. Not FA.