03/14/2026
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| The Stocks Set to Benefit as AI Helps with the War in Iran VIEW IN BROWSER This past week, the headlines have been dominated by the Iran conflict. From the potential for the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz, to the drama with Anthropic and the Department of War, even to an FBI warning that Iran might launch attack drones on the West Coast.It’s no wonder that a story about two college students and a child’s toy didn’t make the headlines. This week, two British brothers rolled a robot onto a table at the University of Bristol and handed it a puzzle most humans struggle to solve.A 4x4x4 Rubik’s Cube.Credit: PoparticMatthew and Thomas Pidden share an obsession for robotics and computing. They built a machine designed to do one thing: solve the cube as fast as possible.The robot solved the puzzle in 45 seconds, earning it a Guinness World Record.The robot used two cameras to scan the cube, but the cameras were blocked by physical sliding shutters until the attempt officially began. That means the robot couldn’t see the cube’s faces until the clock started. The cube was solved entirely by the robot and the software running on the laptop without accessing any external networks.It’s an impressive feat for two students and a homemade robot.And it illustrates something important about where AI is heading – out of the cloud and into machines that interact with the physical world. The Bigger StoryIf you read the Digest regularly, you know the Pidden brothers’ story hints at something much bigger.If college students with limited resources and no profit motive are already building machines that can see, analyze, and manipulate objects in the physical world…Imagine what the world’s largest technology companies are building. We’ve been writing about “physical AI” such as drones for years. Amazon uses more than 1 million robots across its business.Tesla’s humanoid robot, Optimus, features advanced, human-like hands and AI that can learn by observation.Behind every breakthrough in artificial intelligence – every drone, every robot, every AI model, every autonomous system – is an enormous physical backbone.Massive data centers. Advanced semiconductors. Power-hungry computing clusters.And a badly aging electric grid to keep it all running. In other words, the real AI revolution isn’t just happening in software.It’s happening in the infrastructure being built to support it.But building the computing backbone for AI creates a new bottleneck: electricity.Training large AI models and running fleets of autonomous machines requires staggering amounts of power – often as much as a small city.And the traditional utility grid was never designed to support thousands of power-hungry data centers operating around the clock.That’s why the biggest technology companies are beginning to build something entirely new. kommonsentsjane |
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