The bottleneck in neural network development has shifted from software to physics: the main challenges are now heat dissipation and power consumption. That shift just restarted five industries that had been stuck in long stagnation.
Diamonds. Chinese lab-grown diamond makers were losing revenue as the jewelry market cooled. Now they're replacing copper: a single Nvidia chip pulls over 2300 W, and copper heatsinks can no longer cope. Diamond's thermal conductivity is five times higher. After Nvidia announced a switch to diamond composites, the relevant Chinese stock index rose 90% in a year. The Huifeng plant went from shipping tons of industrial abrasive to selling chip substrates one by one.
Hard drives. As the market moved to SSDs en masse, Seagate posted losses back in 2023. Now HDD prices are up 50% year-over-year. The hard drive remains the most cost-effective option for cold storage of training datasets. Seagate's production capacity is sold out through 2027; the stock is up 330%.
Optics. Lumentum and Coherent had been stagnating since the 2001 telecom crash. Today their optical transceivers are the only way to wire thousands of GPUs together inside a data center. Lumentum stock is up 1148% in a year, and Nvidia invested $2B into each company.
Energy. Talen Energy went through bankruptcy due to volatile electricity prices. Today it has a contract to deliver power directly to Amazon's data centers. To keep up with AI demand, utilities are restarting mothballed nuclear reactors and hydro plants.
Ceramics. Japan's Toto (best known for its smart toilets) has been making ceramic wafer chucks for chip lithography machines since 1988. At current chip volumes, this technical ceramics business now accounts for more than half of the company's operating profit. On the news, Toto stock jumped 18% in a single day.
Plenty of white-collar workers walked away from these companies in 2020–2023. Now they're kicking themselves. So think twice before quitting your profession. Just in case.