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On a warm day in mid-July, some 80 scientists comprised of Nobel laureates and nuclear security experts gathered in a 10th-floor conference room at the University of Chicago. They were then asked to imagine their own deaths…
A presenter guided the group’s attention out of the window, past the gothic spires of campus, and traced which neighborhoods could vanish from differently sized nuclear blasts. The exercise, recently chronicled in Popular Mechanics, is part of the process behind one of the most recognizable symbols on Earth: the Doomsday Clock.
When artist Martyl Langsdorf drew it for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ first magazine cover in 1947, she set the hand at seven minutes to midnight for no scientific reason at all… the placement simply “.” The hand has always been a judgment call.
This past January, the Bulletin’s board moved it to 85 seconds to midnight, the closest in its history, citing nuclear arsenals, climate, and the unchecked rise of unregulated artificial intelligence.
Wall Street, it turns out, keeps a clock of its own for AI. And every selloff like the one we just lived through is the crowd grabbing the hand and winding it backward… a collective verdict that the technology’s world-changing promise sits further out than feared, that the disruption is overstated, that midnight is receding.
The stakes of the two clocks differ by orders of magnitude, of course. The mechanism, though, is the same. On the latest episode of Being Exponential with Luke Lango, we read the machinery, and find it running faster than ever.
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What the Selloff Got Wrong
Some blamed Broadcom Inc. (AVGO) for kicking it off. However, we are not buying that story. Broadcom delivered nearly 50% revenue growth, nearly 80% semiconductor revenue growth, more than 140% AI semiconductor revenue growth, and a $30 billion backlog… records across the board. As we say in the episode, there is no fundamental weakness in that report.
And the spending headlines keep stacking up. China is reportedly committing nearly $300 billion over five years to a national network of AI data centers. Nebius Group N.V. (NBIS) is investing 1.7 billion euros to build capacity in the U.K. Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) just announced plans to invest up to 2 billion pounds there over the same stretch. SK Telecom is planning a gigawatt-scale AI cloud in South Korea. OpenAI just raised $122 billion and filed for its IPO. SpaceX is set to raise roughly $75 billion in its own offering.
So what actually spooked the market? We look at three real risks: escalation with Iran sending oil above $110 to $120 and reigniting inflation, political shifts that shouldn’t matter until 2028, and the creeping sense that the market has gotten too euphoric. In the , we walk through why each one, examined closely, looks far more manageable than the tape suggests.
The Toy Every Corporation Wants
Then there’s the viral story that Uber (UBER) blew through its Anthropic token budget… held up in some corners as proof AI isn’t paying off. Our read flips that on its head: buy a kid a new toy, and of course he plays with it every waking hour until you set some limits. The limits don’t mean the toy was a mistake.
Companies are moving from token-maxing to token-budgeting – and a budget line item is precisely what institutionalization looks like. Read the conference calls, and company after company reports AI improving operations across software, hardware, and consumer businesses alike.
The $5 Trillion Floodgate
The episode’s centerpiece is the wave of “kilicorn” IPOs – SpaceX near $1.75 trillion, OpenAI and Anthropic each tracking toward roughly $1.5 trillion. Call it $5 trillion in new market cap hitting public markets in a single year. Many investors read that as a top signal.
History reads it differently…
The giant IPOs of the dot-com era came in 1998 and 1999, and the smaller companies trickled through the gates afterward. The big bulls open the gates first. There’s also one development in particular that could supercharge one corner of this trade: reports that the White House is weighing direct stakes in frontier AI labs, which we interpret as an OpenAI story… and a bullish one for pre-IPO vehicles like SuRo Capital Corp. (SSSS).
Where does all that fresh IPO capital go? Straight back into compute… which means more networking, more memory, more chips, more cooling, more power.
The Jobs Report Mirage
One last contrarian call. Last week’s strong jobs report – more than 170,000 added – revived claims that the AI labor apocalypse was overhyped. We walk through the Challenger, Gray & Christmas data telling a different story: nearly 100,000 job cuts in May, the largest May figure since 2020, with AI cited in roughly 40% of them. AI-driven cuts have already passed 88,000 this year – about 60% more than all of 2025, just five months in.
In the full episode, we lay out the specific accumulation zone we’re watching on the VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH), why we believe the Summer of AI resumes once the SpaceX IPO clears, and the one scenario that would actually change our minds.
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