The AI backlash goes mainstream… why Louis Navellier says don’t worry, invest… where to put your AI dollars today… the chart pointing to $75,000 gold
Have you seen the pee video?
Former NFL star Jason Kelce – brother of Travis Kelce, who married Taylor Swift this summer – walks through a field toward a data center, cradling a jar of urine, and sings:
We want your pee, please give us your pee. Let’s pee on computers together, to save humanity.
It’s part of a viral ad campaign from beverage brands Liquid Death and Garage Beer (the latter co-owned by Jason and Travis Kelce), pledging to “send your pee to the AI data center of your choice.” The gag pokes at something real – the enormous volumes of water these facilities burn through to keep their servers cool.
But the reason a stunt like this goes viral says more than the stunt itself. Liquid Death’s creative chief told CNBC last week the company tries to stay out of politics, yet data centers have become an issue “uniting people across political and cultural spectrums.” This underscores something big…
When a canned-water brand builds a campaign around peeing on data centers, the backlash against AI infrastructure has officially gone mainstream.
Pew Research backs that up: more than half of Americans now say they’re more concerned than excited about AI in daily life – up from 37% in 2021.
Regular Digest readers know we’ve been tracking this revolt for a while. In last week’s Digest, we walked through New York’s first-in-the-nation data center pause, and Texas even tapping the brakes (mildly), and laid out a “sort, don’t sell” playbook for your AI holdings.
Since then, the pushback has only widened. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro signed an executive order mandating developers obtain local approval before the Department of Environmental Protection reviews data centers’ permit applications. Meanwhile, the National Republican Senatorial Committee is privately warning that data centers have become a midterm “sleeper issue” that could become a decisive factor in an election.
So, this circles us back to a question we’ve wrestled with – the same one that one of Louis Navellier’s subscribers asked point-blank to the investment legend last week…
“Should we be concerned about the moratoriums on data center buildouts?”
Let’s jump straight to Louis’ takeaway:
The simple answer is no.
Louis traces the worry back to that New York moratorium – the one-year pause Gov. Kathy Hochul signed to give the state time to write consistent standards. But he expects shovels to move again once those rules are set, noting that upstate New York is ideal for data centers thanks to cheap hydroelectric power.
Then he redirects his subscriber to the actual buildout that’s happening, not the headlines trumpeting discontent.
Here’s Louis:
The data center boom continues relatively unabated nationally… the number of data centers in the U.S. is still set to nearly double.
According to Stanford University’s AI Index Report, there were 5,427 data centers in the U.S. at the end of 2025. There are plans to add 3,969 new data centers – 802 of which are currently under construction.
Data center construction rose 7% in June to $68.3 billion, which represented a 46% year-over-year increase.
I can speak to this anecdotally. A good friend works in private equity, specializing in construction deals. Last week, he told me the demand he’s seeing for data centers is “off the charts” with “no sign of slowing.”
But what about news that some data centers have been canceled, potentially due to political pressure? After all, it’s reported that nearly half of all the data centers planned for 2026 have been delayed or canceled.
Back to Louis:
That stat is real, but it’s less alarming than it sounds for two reasons.
First, of course, there are delays – that’s exactly what happens when an industry is booming faster than its supply chains can keep up!…
Second, a lot of these “planned” projects were never as real as the headlines suggest. Most of these estimates count a project the moment it’s announced – a press release, a real estate filing, sometimes just a non-binding letter of intent – none of which guarantees the project ever gets built.
Louis’ bottom line is that while some individual projects will get delayed or shelved, the overall data center boom remains fully intact. And that makes the path forward very easy for investors today:
The reality is that the data center boom will persist for the foreseeable future – and the best way to profit from it is to stay invested in strategic AI- and data center-related stocks.
But which ones, exactly?
That’s the question today.
After all, some AI stocks have soared hundreds – even thousands – of percent over the last two years. Will these outperformers from yesterday be the outperformers of tomorrow?
And what about robotics? That’s a corner of the AI boom that Wall Street hasn’t fully priced in yet. Which of those stocks are likely to be the multi-baggers of the future?
Finally, out of all the stocks that make it to your short list, which ones deserve a spot in your portfolio?
As an example, look at Louis, alongside Luke Lango of Innovation Investor and Eric Fry of Fry’s Investment Report. Between them, these three have issued dozens of AI recommendations over the past year. This has turned into loads of winners – but also created a challenge…
You can’t invest in all of them – so, which ones get top billing? And how much goes in each? Perhaps most importantly, in a holistic portfolio, how do they fit together?
With these questions in mind, Louis, Luke, and Eric went back through their entire universe of AI research and distilled it into a small, hand-picked basket of their highest-conviction ideas – each with a recommended allocation. Not just what to buy, but how to build it, spread deliberately across every rung of the AI infrastructure ladder rather than piled into a single stock or sector.
They unveiled this rebuilt . I’ve seen the holdings, and it directly addresses Louis’ recommendation above to “invest in strategic AI- and data center-related stocks.”
The replay is up for a limited time. .
We’ll keep tracking the data center backlash in the months ahead.
$40 trillion reasons to own gold
The last time we checked in on gold was in our June 15 Digest. Investors were busy piling back into the AI trade, riding relief over a preliminary U.S.–Iran peace deal (which, as we now know, didn’t hold). I suggested a different focus:
While most investors are cannonballing back into the AI trade, there’s another setup that looks even more attractive today…
Gold.
Turns out I was about a month early on the call as gold dipped slightly lower. Still, had you jumped in that day and held, congrats – you’re up nearly 11% as I write, easily beating the S&P 500’s 3% return over the same stretch, and crushing the Global X Artificial Intelligence & Technology ETF (AIQ), an AI proxy that’s down about 3%.
The question now is a simple one: what happens next?
It’ll be uneven, but gold should keep climbing. And for the same reason that’s driven the yellow metal for years – Washington can’t stop spending.
Last week, the U.S. national debt crossed $40 trillion for the first time in history. To put that in perspective, our debt has doubled since 2017.
We’re now borrowing roughly $6 billion a day, and more than half of that is simply interest on money we’ve already spent. Annual interest payments run about $1.1 trillion – meaning we now spend more on servicing our debt than we do on defending the country.
On the current path, the nonpartisan Peter G. Peterson Foundation projects that we will hit $50 trillion within six years.
That’s not a spending problem anymore. It’s a compounding one.
Washington just showed its hand
Last week, as the 30-year Treasury yield spiked to its highest level in nearly two decades, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent moved to at least double the government’s buybacks of long-dated debt and hinted the operations could grow even larger, potentially hitting $4 billion.
In an interview, Bessent said the Treasury is going to “make a market” in longer-dated Treasuries, whose yields have been jumping this summer.
Excuse me?
We have to “make a market” for U.S. Treasuries – the single most liquid, most sought-after asset on the planet? The bedrock of the entire global financial system? The “risk-free” benchmark that every other asset on Earth is priced against? The asset central banks, pension funds, and foreign governments have lined up to buy for the better part of a century?
Apparently, so. The Treasury Secretary is telling us Uncle Sam must drum up buyers for his own debt.
When the world’s deepest market needs its own issuer to manufacture demand, that’s not a liquidity hiccup. That’s disorder – and it’s exactly the backdrop that sends investors into gold.
Why your portfolio needs gold exposure
Check out the chart below. The blue bars show how much of the federal debt is backed by U.S. gold reserves.
In 1940, that figure hit 51%. By 1980, after a decade of inflation, it was 18%.
Today? Just 3%.
Source: IMF, Tavi Costa
The chart also shows the implied price of gold at these various percentages of U.S. gold reserves as a percentage of U.S. debt.
Notice that the two prior peaks on this chart, 1940 and 1980, both occurred during real fiscal and monetary reckonings. When those crises hit, the backing ratio didn’t drift higher. It exploded.
For example, gold ran from around $35 an ounce in the early 1970s to more than $850 by January 1980 as investors scrambled for a hard asset they could trust.
Now, do the math on the chart. For gold to reclaim the 18% backing level from the 1980s, it would need to trade near $26,000 an ounce – more than five times today’s price of about $4,700 an ounce. A full return to the 51% from the 1940’s implies gold at $75,000.
Those are eye-watering numbers, and I’m not telling you to bank on them or to put a date on them. But my point isn’t to try to predict an exact figure or return – it’s to convey the asymmetry of this opportunity.
If the next collective scare over federal spending drives even a partial move back toward historical norms, the upside in gold isn’t measured in percentage points – it’s measured in multiples.
How do you play it?
The simplest, one-click route is SPDR Gold Shares (GLD), the ETF that tracks the price of physical gold. Buy it, and you own the move, full stop.
For a higher-octane approach, look at the gold miners. Because their profits are leveraged to the gold price, they tend to move more than the metal itself – in both directions.
Take Westgold Resources (WGXRF). This is a miner our macro investing expert, Eric Fry, made to his subscribers and still holds.
Since our June 15 Digest, while gold has jumped about 11%, WGXRF has surged more than 35%.
Eric’s subscribers are up 294%. But if gold spikes on fears of fiscal chaos, that’s likely just the start.
Wrapping up
Not long ago, when Eric profiled the case for gold, he borrowed a line from the great financial writer James Grant:
Gold is a bet on monetary disorder – indeed, on other kinds of disorder too, including fiscal, geopolitical and presidential.
Today, none of the four disorders Grant identifies has dissipated. If anything, they’re growing more disordered – to the point that our government must play “market maker” for its own debt.
It’s hard to see how gold does anything but go higher over the coming years. Potentially, significantly higher.
To track gold – and the best way to play it – alongside Eric in Fry’s Investment Report, .
We’ll keep you updated on all these stories here in the Digest.
Have a good evening,
Jeff Remsburg
