“President Trump is replacing the U.S. Dollar, built on a pact that most Americans have never heard of, backed by a coalition of some of the most powerful nations on Earth. And bypassing every legal and political channel under the guise of national security.

“Trump’s new dollar is the biggest change to America’s money in more than half a century. A change that could determine which side of one of the greatest wealth divides in history your family ends up on. A radical monetary shift already set in motion.

“This has nothing to do with CBDCs, Bitcoin, crypto, or digital money. But soon, every American could be using Trump’s new dollar to pay for groceries, gas, medical bills, everything. And whether you support Donald Trump or not. The White House calls it a transformative force for our long-term prosperity.”

That’s a little introductory bit from Porter Stansberry’s “Trump’s New Dollar” spiel that a bunch of readers have been asking about, so we’re going to dig in today and identify what’s really being recommended.

The offer this time is similar to some past Porter & Co. ads — they’re keeping their base subscription relatively expensive, Porter Stansberry’s Complete Investor is usually offered at $1,425/year, but they bring in “entry level” buyers with lower cost packages of “special reports” that don’t require a subscription, usually, as is the case today, for a $199 flat fee. Just about all publishers do something like this, counting on the fact that the people who sign up to pay something, whether it’s $59/year for an entry level newsletter or $199 for a bunch of special reports, will have good future “upgrade” potential… especially if those initial recommendations are successful. And if they flop, that’s OK — the special reports were already mostly written anyway, they came out of earlier newsletter recommendations to the existing paid subscribers, so no great cost or effort was incurred, other than sitting Porter in front of a camera to make his pitch.

In this case, the two special reports on offer are “The Silicon Dollar Playbook,” and “The AI Foundation.” That Silicon Dollar bit is new, but the “AI Foundation” was first pitched by Porter back in January, that’s a recommendation to buy building materials leader Amrize (AMRZ), so you can see the basic story about that one here. I’ll share a bit of an update about Amrize toward the end today, but we’ll spend most of our time digging into this “Silicon Dollar” story and identifying the stocks in that report.

The basic spiel is not the “new dollar” stuff you’ve heard over and over from a variety of pitchmen in recent years, the ads about how there’s going to be a new central bank digital currency that will punish you if your transactions aren’t in line with the preferences of President Trump (or whoever’s in charge next). Most of that is scammy “put your IRA in our overpriced gold coins” stuff.

No, what Porter is talking up is the end of the petrodollar, and the rise of what he calls the silicon dollar.

Part of what propped up the US$ over the past 50 years, since President Nixon took us off the gold standard in order to take budgetary pressure off the government (allowing them to keep spending more heavily on initiatives that started with FDR’s Social Security, Johnson’s Great Society, and the quagmire of the Vietnam War, among other stuff), was, at least in part, the “petrodollar” agreement.

That agreement had a lot of grandfathers, but it was basically driven by Saudi Arabia’s strange position at the time — they were a country that was suddenly extremely wealthy, in part thanks to the 1973 oil crisis that followed the Yom Kippur War, but they also existed as an almost defenseless kingdom, sitting on top of untold wealth, in an era of radical uprisings and the emergence of revolutionary leaders in the Arab world, some of which were Soviet-backed. They wanted friends and weapons, and Henry Kissinger essentially negotiated a deal that Saudi Arabia, the source of almost all the surplus oil in the world at the time, would price its oil only in dollars… and that the US would then supply Saudi Arabia with military equipment and training and economic cooperation. Essentially, the agreement was that the Saudi’s would only take dollars for their oil, increasing demand for and use of that currency around the world, at a time when that was in question because of the demise of the Bretton Woods agreement and the end of the gold backing for the dollar… and that they’d recycle a lot of that capital into U.S. Treasury Bonds and buying US weapons. There were plenty of hiccups along the way, including subsequent oil crises — but the military alliance and the spirit of the petrodollar have held.

That is widely seen to be in the first stages of fading now, though — it wasn’t a written treaty that “expired” after 50 years or anything like that, so it’s not like Saudi Arabia formally “canceled” the deal, (though that’s how the Chinese spin the story), it was always an informal “military and economic cooperation” alliance… but over the past couple years, with the rise of China as a key oil customer, and the increased cooperation between Russia and Saudi Arabia (Russia is the + in OPEC+), and with greater financial power and a somewhat more diversified economy in the Middle East, we’ve been seeing more and more oil change hands in Chinese Yuan or other currencies. And the Saudis have at least dipped their toe into currency arrangements with China and other BRICS nations, though that’s more “diversifying” than “turning off the dollar spigot” at the moment. And, of course, the world has also found a lot more oil in the past 50 years, including the US, which is far less dependent on oil imports than was the case in Nixon’s time.

That trend of a weakening petrodollar gradually reduces the power of the United States Dollar, since China and Japan and so many other major energy importers might theoretically be able to skip a step, they won’t have to buy dollars first before they can use those dollars to buy oil. They usually still do, though — the dollar is still overwhelmingly dominant as the mechanism of global trade, and it’s very likely that at least 80% of oil is still traded using US dollars… but yes, it’s fading a bit, probably more because the United States has weaponized the dollar system, sanctioning major oil producers like Russia and Iran, than because of any newfound Saudi flexibility. But regardless of the reason, any weakening of the petrodollar and the U.S. Dollar’s global primacy will present a challenge because losing the extraordinary privilege of controlling the world’s major reserve currency and major transactional currency is likely to be expensive.

The petrodollar is a big part of why the US has been able to run ever-growing deficits and service a rapidly rising amount of debt for decades — the demand for dollars around the world has been strong enough that we’ve been able to just keep printing more, and have not been forced to come close to living within our means. Some of that carries the tacit acceptance of our friends, allies and frenemies on the global stage, since that’s also what allows the US to be the one country that has a dozen aircraft carriers and has historically been counted on to act as the world’s “policeman,” but the pushback grows as China’s economy grows and the world becomes more bilateral, with two superpowers.

And, as Present Trump has been focused on, owning the global reserve currency is not just a privilege that allows you to borrow and spend with near impunity, it’s also a burden — we might argue about how much of a burden, but it generally is seen as making the dollar stronger than it would otherwise be, relative to other currencies, and that has helped to drive the outsourcing wave since the 1980s, hollowing out industrial production in the US because it was cheaper to import stuff from countries who embraced having a weak currency and the export-led growth that comes along with that, most notably China.

That’s how I see it, at least. Here’s how Porter puts it:

“The Trump administration has rolled back climate commitments, has reopened retired coal plants, has restarted Three Mile Island, has green-lit offshore drilling access across 625 million acres. And for the first time in peacetime American history, the US government has taken direct equity stakes in private mining companies like MP Materials, USA Rare Earth, Lithium Americas, Trilogy Metals, stocks that surged in price when the news hit.

“This is what mobilization looks like. Every move, every deal, every executive order, All of it is directed at a single objective, to reset the dollar once again, to replace the petrodollar with the silicon dollar. Just as every nation has needed to buy dollars to buy oil over the last 52 years, Trump’s plan is that any nation which wants to participate in the AI economy will need to transact through American controlled resources. That is the architecture of a whole new monetary order….

“The entire logic of the silicon dollar is about cutting China out of the physical inputs to AI. Companies caught on the wrong side of that realignment won’t just underperform, they’ll be crippled. The silicon dollar will not greatly reward companies that just use AI, it will reward the companies AI cannot exist without… because within the AI matrix there are very few choke points, just a relative handful of companies where huge waves of capital have no choice but to flow through. Companies with the kind of competitive positions that come along once in a lifetime.”

So that’s what he’s pitching, naturally, those chokepoints — so we’ve got five “chokepoint” stocks featured in this “Silicon Dollar” special report. Which ones are they?

Here’s how Porter describes AI Chokepoint Number One…

“I have never discussed this company publicly before. It’s not a household name and it will not be found on any list of popular AI stocks. But it’s a business with the kind of irreplaceable competitive position that comes along perhaps once in a decade. I believe it could grow into one of the defining companies of the silicon dollar era.”

OK, I’m intrigued! What does this company do? In his words:

“Everyone knows that Nvidia makes the chips that run the AI revolution. Their GPUs rank amongst the most in-demand commodities in the history of capitalism. But Nvidia’s chips are useless without a component so specialized, so technically demanding, that only one company in America has cracked how to build it at the scale the AI rollout now demands.

“It is the power delivery system that sits inside every AI server rack. The invisible infrastructure that takes raw electricity and converts it into the ultra-high current low voltage power that Nvidia’s GPUs actually run on.”

That’s starting to sound a little familiar… apparently they’ve got a patent win which means more folks need to use their systems:

“One company saw this coming a decade ago and patented a proprietary power delivery architecture that is the only commercially proven solution to the power density problem now choking the AI build-out. When the International Trade Commission investigated, it found that multiple electronics giants were infringing on this company’s patents. The settlement sent royalty revenues soaring. This is an irreplaceable business sitting at the exact choke point of the entire AI revolution. A choke point so powerful, not even Nvidia can get around it.”

Porter compares this to Qualcomm’s (QCOM) historical dominance in wireless standards, which led to them charging huge royalties and licensing fees to provide access to the required technology for cell phones to connect to 3G, 4G and 5G networks, peaking out with them earning something like $35 for every iPhone sold before their leverage started to fade a bit, a few years ago.

And we get some more specific hints:

“The company now has a backlog of over $300 million and that’s up 70% in a single quarter. Revenue is forecast to surge more than 34% this year as major AI hyperscalers ramp orders for the next generation power modules.

“And here’s the kicker. In February, the US government imposed 100% tariffs on competing power modules manufactured in China. This company makes everything in Massachusetts, which gives it a huge advantage. Practically every competitor’s cost doubled overnight. Now this stock has already been on a significant surge, but I don’t think it’s even close to finish. It’s gonna double or triple from here in the near term.”

That’s Vicor (VICR), which they just hinted at (and we deteased) as a recommendation for the first time a couple weeks ago — I bought some shares at that time, since I found the company’s commentary on the past couple earnings calls pretty compelling, and the odds of a meaningful increase in royalty revenue seemed very high. Here’s part of the Quick Take that I shared with the Irregulars at that time:

“This is a pitch for a company that the Porter & Co. folks believe is pivotal for the power management needs of data centers… at the chip level, with Vicor, a pioneering power management chip company that has been sleepy for a long time, but has strong growth right now, a lead customer in Cerebras for its proprietary high power systems for those wafer scale chips, and meaningful growth in revenue as they ramp up capacity for that lead customer and others, both in high performance computing and in industrial markets (including automotive, defense and space). This is a risky one, but I got sucked into the story after listening to a few of their conference calls, and I like the opportunity they have to meaningfully beat the analyst estimates in 2027 and 2028, particularly if they keep winning court cases regarding their intellectual property and see a boost in royalty revenue, too… so with the stock trading at a very steep current valuation (~80X earnings and about 40X what I think they’ll earn in 2027), I was willing to put on a smallish position and bet on that 30% revenue growth persisting for a couple years and leading to margin improvement that’s a bit stronger than analysts are currently guessing.”

The news improved not long after I wrote those words, with another major licensee agreeing to a royalty deal, and with Vicor lifting its forward guidance as a result, which bumped the stock up by 20% or so. Really, though, that was just a guidance change for this second quarter, lifting the revenue outlook by about 14%, and the story is much the same — this new licensing deal just gives a little more confidence about the trajectory we’re likely to be on, with more deals and higher demand for Vicor’s products, as they also try to expand capacity materially, both by expanding their fab facilities here in Massachusetts, and perhaps by licensing out some production to other manufacturers. I still think the 2027 earnings estimates are likely substantially too low, given the optimism the company has shared on their recent calls and the demand from fast-growing customers like Cerebras… and forward estimates have gone up a little bit, but not nearly as much as the stock has gone up in the past few weeks, so Vicor shares are now trading at about 85X 2027 analyst earnings estimates. Hasn’t gotten less risky, given the valuation, and it’s riding along with the general surge in semiconductor stocks, which means things will probably continue to be very volatile… but so far, the news has improved, and the stock has moved up a bit.

And what else? Let’s move on to AI Chokepoint Number Two, as teased in the Silicon Dollar Playbook…

“There’s a lot more than just the power one, because AI doesn’t run on power alone. I’ve spent 20 years telling my readers about the single greatest secret in the financial markets, the royalty business model, and specifically the royalty model applied to the mining sector.

“You don’t want to own the mine. You don’t want to employ the workers. You don’t want to have to bear the costs of all the dynamite and all the actual mining. You simply want to own a legal right to a percentage of every single thing that comes out of the ground of that mine, forever. Every ounce of metal, every dollar of rising commodity prices will flow directly to your bottom line. These royalty companies have no capital costs. They have no operational risk. It’s a pure toll road. Bang for the buck. It’s the closest thing to a profit printing machine I have ever discovered in finance.

“Franco Nevada (FNV), a stock I’ve held on my recommended portfolios for nearly 20 years, has compounded at an extraordinary rate since its 2007 IPO. Not because it operates a single mine, but because it owns royalties on hundreds of mines. It’s the closest thing to a money printing machine I’ve ever found in 30 years of investing.”

So yes, this is another “next Franco-Nevada” story…

“The second stock in the Silicon Dollar Playbook is a company running the exact same Franco-Nevada model. Except for it is four years old instead of 20, which means the compounding hasn’t really even started yet.”

We might argue numbers a little there — Franco-Nevada was really founded in 1983 and bought its first royalty in 1986, so it’s more than 40 years old… though yes, they did get taken private in 2002 (by Newmont), and then re-floated in an IPO in 2007, so technically this “new Franco-Nevada” is just under 20 years old.

What about this new company?

“It owns royalty streams on silver, copper, and gold across four continents. The metals that go into every AI chip, every data center, every piece of the physical layer in the AI matrix.

“In 2024, it generated $12 million in revenue. This year, it’s going to generate nearly $100 million. By 2028, our analysts believe that figure will approach $300 million. Without the company spending a single dollar on mine development. If production hits targets, this company could become the next Franco Nevada, potentially delivering 5-8X returns in the next four years alone.”

We follow royalty companies closely, including with regular updates to our Gold Royalty Companies spreadsheet for our favorite people, so I don’t even need to pull the Thinkolator out of the garage to tell you this is Versamet Royalties (VMET), which, like most of the royalty companies, is levered to gold and silver… but does have some exposure to copper and nickel, too, even though their recent Eskay Creek royalty deal means they’ve gotten more gold-levered (their 2028 forecast is that their 79% of their “gold equivalent ounces” will come directly from gold production, with 12% from silver and the other 9% split between copper & nickel). That stock jumps out on our spreadsheets as having the best growth among the larger royalty companies, so their growth-adjusted valuation looks quite impressive, even if, compared to the big boys like Franco-Nevada, it trades at a pretty rich valuation relative to current cash flow. It’s also, given their management team’s history, perhaps the most likely $1 billion-plus royalty company to be amenable to a future takeover. So far, the stock has held up fairly well, despite the softening of gold prices in recent months.

This was a softly-teased recommendation from Porter Stansberry’s Complete Investor back in April, and we covered that story at the time. Here’s how I summed it up:

“If you’ve been an irregular for more than a month or so you know that I also like Versamet for its unusually high growth rate (guidance is that gold equivalent ounces should more than double this year, then double again by 2028 — the fastest growing large cap royalty firms are hoping for more like 50% total ounces growth over the next 4-5 years), but also that the push to grow ounces fast means they’re paying stiff prices for new deals, including the big “tentpole” deal for an Eskay Creek gold stream that we covered a couple weeks ago, and they’re also relying more on debt financing than the larger royalty companies. That means VMET is probably the gold royalty firm that’s most levered to higher gold prices, given their growth… but also most sensitive to a gold price collapse, should that happen to come along in the next 2-3 years. I like it for a little growth boost in the portfolio, but we’ll pay for that growth by taking a little extra risk.”

If you’re looking for a royalty company that’s tweaked a little more toward copper and the “AI and electrification” story, but still is mostly a precious metals firm, then Elemental Royalty (ELE) might also be of interest — lower growth, though they also recently made a transformational new royalty purchase, but they currently get about a third of their revenue from “other” metals, mostly copper… and they’re trading at about half the cash flow multiple of Versamet (I own both stocks, just FYI). There are also some other interesting little players further down the list on our Gold Royalties page.

And we move on — two down, three to go… AI Chokepoint Number Three is natural gas:

“Silicon dollar stock number three is America’s dominant natural gas producer. The energy demands of AI are going to be unlike anything the world has ever seen, with data centers consuming more power than a small country. What people don’t understand is natural gas is the fuel the AI revolution actually runs on, not on solar power, not nuclear, (not yet), natural gas. And this company produces approximately 6% of all the natural gas in the United States. It also operates at the lowest cost of any natural gas producer in America. Meaning, when gas prices rise, and we believe they will, Virtually every incremental dollar flows straight to the bottom line of this company. It has already generated a billion dollars in free cash flow in a single month. I call this business the Gods of Gas, and nothing has changed my mind. Over the long term, I think this is going to be one of the most profitable positions I have ever put in front of my readers.

That is the umpteenth recommendation of the Gods of Gas that Porter Stansberry has made since retiring from Stansberry Research and founding Porter & Co, so we covered his first substack pitch about that story about four years ago, and have seen him promoting that “Gods of Gas” theme quite regularly since then.

And no, they’re not getting a billion in free cash flow every month because of AI, though they did have their first $1+ billion month of free cash flow to start this year because they had the good fortune to come into 2026 unhedged (which is unlike them), and were able to sell their monthly production at a much higher price because of the extreme cold snap across most of the eastern US.

So that was a one-off bonanza, generating more than twice their usual free cash flow, but it’s also true that EQT has been impressively conservative with their drilling strategy, only increasing production when prices make that sensible, and they do operate a low-cost operation in the heart of the Marcellus Shale area, mostly in western Pennsylvania. The challenge for EQT in years past has been that they’re somewhat constrained by infrastructure, and that continues to a degree, just because of the limited pipeline capacity to move Marcellus gas to other markets and the unwillingness of folks in the Northeast to approve more pipelines — but they did buy into the new Mountain Valley Pipeline a couple years ago and work to complete and fill that pipeline, which effectively (this is a bit of an exaggeration) delivers gas from the Marcellus to Data Center Alley in Virginia, so that’s beginning to help, and that was one of the reasons that EQT was able to grow revenue by close to 50% last year.

EQT is the biggest natural gas producer in the US, and has vast reserves, so while they’re not as tied in with the LNG export trade, in part because their gas is further from the Gulf Coast where almost all the LNG facilities are located, they do certainly benefit from the general trend of higher electricity consumption in the summer and for AI power demands, in addition to the general ‘cold weather’ and industrial demand for gas. Natural gas is the fastest-growing fuel in power generation, and has been the natural replacement for the many coal plants that have shut down over the past 20 years. And they have, like ExxonMobil, become more of an ‘integrated major’ in the gas space, thanks largely to their investment in distribution infrastructure. The general expectation right now is that EQT will grow revenues by about 15% this year… but that they’ll get a much bigger earnings boost, with earnings per share forecast to jump from $3.05 last year to ~$4.70 in 2026. That means, at about $55, we’d be paying about 12X forward earnings to buy EQT today… though their cash flow will likely be much higher than that, since depletion and depreciation charges have a big impact, so their cash flow per share could be well above $9.

The downside is that analysts don’t really trust natural gas, so they don’t see much growth coming — and that has brought the stock down recently, as both gas and oil prices have come down a bit on hopes that the Iran War will be ending soon, which will free up more LNG and oil exports from the Persian Gulf. So analysts see earnigns staying pretty flat through 2026 and 2027, and the stock price is just about where it was 18 months ago. If you expect natural gas prices to rise because of inexorable demand for electricity for AI (or for more LNG exports to help make up for Persian Gulf shortfalls), EQT is starting to become an almost contrarian opportunity. That’s not unique to EQT, though EQT’s management does get credit for being more disciplined and visionary than most in this sector… you’ll see similar stock price performance and valuations at other big gas producers — the other popular stock in the space we see teased often is Antero Resources (AR), in case you want to do some comparison shopping.

And it looks like we’re staying in the “energy” part of this “chokepoint” story for a while now… what are the clues about AI Chokepoint Number Four”

“Our fourth stock, well, it’s the ultimate intermediary. This company collects passive royalty income from 87,000 mineral acres in the heart of the Permian Basin, which again is America’s most prolific energy producing region. But it employs no drillers. It operates no rigs. It just owns the mineral rights to the land that some of the largest energy companies in America cannot produce oil and gas without.

“And West Texas, where this company’s acreage sits, is rapidly becoming the premier destination for AI data center construction. Because it sits on top of the cheapest natural gas in North America. As the AI build-out accelerates, the demand for energy production on this company’s land is going to follow. The royalties follow automatically without this company spending a single additional dollar. This is mailbox money at the choke point of the silicon dollar era.”

That’s almost certainly Viper Energy (VNOM), the royalty owning subsidary of Diamondback Energy (FANG), and another holding that Porter Stansberry and I have in common. Viper did have 86,639 net royalty acres in the Permian as of last quarter, though they added a little more than 3,000 net acres with an acquisition about a month ago. Here’s an excerpt of what I shared with the Irregulars after Viper’s first quarter report:

“Viper Energy (VNOM) had some news this time out, with another acquisition announced in their earnings report… so there was some negative surprise to the results, since that acquisition brought on another $300 million in debt and meant they were back above the debt levels that would allow them to pay out 100% of their cash flow for shareholder returns (they’re a distribution-focused company, so that would mostly be higher special dividends, though they do buy back shares at times when the price is low enough). They bought Riverbend Oil & Gas IX, which looks like it was a private equity-funded rollup of Permian oil properties, and paid about $330 million in cash and another $150 million or so worth of Viper shares, in order to boost their mineral rights portfolio in the Permian and Delaware basins by about 3,000 acres — a lot of it overlapping with existing Viper royalty areas, so they know the properties well. This was nowhere near as large as the transformative Sitio acquisition last year, which was what first drove VNOM shares down into my buying range, but it clearly caused a little hiccup in investor worries, since it’s a pause in the debt-reduction path they had been on since that larger acquisition. And, well, just because investors tend to have a knee-jerk ‘sell’ response to any acquisition.

“Really, though, that Riverbend acquisition doesn’t make much difference — the deal does diversify their position a bit, including adding more operators and increasing their exposure to New Mexico, and should be accretive to Viper’s financial results (meaning, it adds more cash flow per share, despite the additional interest cost and the higher share count), and adding more Permian acreage that will generate future cash flow growth was very likely the right call to make, particularly because they implied that they underwrote the acquisition with an assumption of ~$70 oil, which matches the futures pricing for next year, and it is accretive with $55 oil, so they’re not paying up at extreme valuations given the persistence of $100 oil in recent months. But it’s also not a huge deal, it is only expected to increase their average daily production this year by about 1.5%.

“And they did still direct roughly 90% of cash flow this quarter to shareholder returns, which led to a higher dividend. They declared a 30 cent variable dividend this quarter, on top of steady quarterly base dividend of 38 cents, for a total of 68 cents — which, if future quarters are at the same level, would provide a yield of 5.9% at $46 (they probably won’t be, the variable dividend is driven by matters outside of Viper’s control, like the number of wells completed and the price of oil). They also repurchased a bunch of shares in the $43-44 range, so the total shareholder return was $94 million, out of ‘adjusted cash available for distribution’ of $105 million. I’m not worried about the ‘shareholder return’ being 90% instead of 100% this quarter.

“The stock continues to react mostly to shifting expectations about oil prices over the next year, which are in turn driven by expectations of how the war ends, when the Strait of Hormuz might really reopen, and how long it will take for the oil market to ‘normalize’ after that. Viper Energy was pretty cautious on the call, not promising any ramp-up in drilling by their operating partners, even though everyone’s pretty sure that these high oil prices will spur at least some additional drilling activity — Viper likes to wait until those wells have really been drilled before starting to assume any growth in future production.

“So I expect we’ve probably got some meaningful growth in the dividend and probably a higher valuation for VNOM shares coming later in the year if a number of new production wells do go online in response to $100 oil, and particularly if oil averages something over $70-75 this year. That’s not guaranteed, of course, but it seems a likely outcome to me — and I can handle the volatility if oil falls sharply whenever ‘peace’ breaks out. Viper is at essentially no risk of not being able to cover their base dividend (which currently offers a ~3.2% yield), they’ve been clear in saying that dividend should be sustainable as long as oil remains above $30/barrel… and I think the odds are good that payouts will rise over the coming decade, as oil prices rise with inflation and new production technologies increase output from the Permian Basin.”

Moving on to AI Chokepoint Number Five

“The final company in our briefing is the most important company in the Permian Basin that nobody’s ever heard of. America’s largest oil and gas producing region, responsible for half of domestic oil output, is at risk of grinding to a halt. Not because it is running out of oil, but because it is running out of places to put the wastewater. One company owns the total solution. It has built the largest produced water pipeline network in America. When the regulator shut down the competition, this company’s market share in the Delaware basin jumped from 5% to 39% in a single year. Let me put it to you simply. There is practically no Permian oil production without this company. And no Permian oil production means no cheap gas for AI data centers. So this is the ultimate choke point play. It’s hiding in plain sight. It has incredible 50% EBITDA margins. But it’s priced like a boring pipeline business. It’s not boring. And it will not be priced this way for long. “

It’s possible that Porter is pitching LandBridge (LB) here, which owns the land under those water pipelines and much of the pore space for disposing of that wastewater underground… but more likely he’s teasing its subsidiary WaterBridge Infrastructure (WBI), which was built by the same private equity firm and has focused on building out pipeline and processing capacity for fracking water. And yes, WBI does have roughly 50% EBITDA margins, and those numbers are a little better than at LB. It’s an interesting business, with rising competition as other companies leap at the opportunity to manage the water problem in West Texas, but I’ve not ever gotten my head around a reasonable valuation for the stock, so I’ll leave that to you — WBI is still pretty small, with a market cap under $4 billion, and today it trades at about 4X forward revenue and 40X forward earnings (EV/EBITDA is ~8-9X), with margins expected to improve over the next couple years.

And I promised a little note about that “bonus” idea, too… so what’s up with the “AI Foundation?” Here’s how Porter teases it:

“It’s called the AI Foundation… what I believe is one of the greatest businesses in the history of American capitalism. It’s a company over 100 years old, hiding in plain sight, that has quietly become one of the single most important suppliers to the AI data center build-out. A firm with an unassailable physical moat trading at a dramatic discount to its closest peer, with an insider buy from its CEO that is the largest concentrated open market purchase in corporate history.”

So yes, that’s the building materials company Amrize (AMRZ), which was spun out as the North American business of global cement leader Holcim last year. I also own and like this one, and it’s a pretty compelling story, the largest cement and aggregates business in the US, operating hundreds of local near-monopoly quarries and cement plants that are hard to replace, and particularly for aggregate, must be pretty local to big construction projects, otherwise the cost of transporting rocks is just too high. Those materials constitute about 75% of Amrize’s business, but the remaining 25%, which they call “building envelope” but is mostly the manufacture of roofing supplies, is in a bit of a slump and dragging down revenue growth. Still, the CEO, who bought big after the IPO, has kept buying — here’s part of the note I shared with our Irregulars a couple weeks ago, when I bought more shares:

“CEO Jan Jenisch has continued buying, adding another $1.4 million or so worth of shares this month, after making larger purchases in March and last October, and starting with his big buys of a total of about $50 million last August, shortly after Amrize was spun out of Holcim (and after he opted to go with Amrize as CEO, rather than stay in a similar role at Holcim). He may or may not be right about the value and opportunity in Amrize, and I don’t know what kind of time horizon he’s thinking about, but he’s not being at all shy about placing his bets and keeping a lot of ‘skin in the game’ as the leader of the company.

“Thanks to weakness in the roofing/building envelope business, which they expect to begin to bounce back later this year (they might be wrong, depends on how much construction and rehab activity there is, and what weather is like for the roofing part of that business), Amrize is now back to near its immediate post-spin lows of last Summer, and close to its lowest valuation as a public company, at about 17X forward earnings. The most compelling competitors on the aggregate/cement side, Martin Marietta (MLM) and Vulcan (VMC), are still at about 27X forward earnings — they deserve to be at a premium to Amrize, since they’re smaller and more focused on aggregates and asphalt, so their mix of businesses is a little better than Amrize (aggregate is the best local ‘moat’ business at the moment), and they don’t have the drag of the building envelope/roofing business, but I persist in believing that the valuation difference should not be this extreme… particularly with Amrize just making a great aggregates acquisition in West Texas this year that’s already boosting returns.

“We’ll see how the back half of the year goes, there is the risk that we’ll have to be more patient with Amrize than I expected… but I don’t think there’s much risk of the company really falling apart, they have an irreplaceable footprint of cement and aggregate production facilities throughout North America, insiders are buying, and the price is reasonable. That’s a good recipe for solid long-term returns. Maybe it takes off in the latter part of this year as roofing demand and data center builds ramp up, and they prove to have been very conservative in their guidance, as they implied on the call a few weeks back… maybe we have to wait a few years, or wait through the economic cycle if we have a recession, we’ll see. I’m OK with patience with this kind of company, there is no replacement for cement and aggregates when you’re building roads, bridges, data centers, apartment buildings, factories, new housing developments and the like… and most of those construction projects will need roofing, too.”

The stock has bounced back a bit since then, so it’s now closer to 20X forward earnings… but their near-peers have bounced back, too, so the valuation gap remains similar.

So in the end, our five stocks today are mostly treading familiar ground — Vicor is pretty new to our universe, and an interesting new kind of story, but Porter’s otherwise pitching a growth-focused precious metals royalty company, a natural gas firm, an oil and gas royalty company, a water company that’s primarily an oil services firm, and the leading cement and aggregates company, so he’s mostly pushing the “hard assets” side of the AI buildout, the metals, building materials, and energy that will be needed to keep building and powering data centers.

A fair amount of overlap with my portfolio in here, and I am generally sympathetic to those ideas, so I might be biased on some of these names… and with your money, of course, it’s your thinking that matters, so I’ll open up the floor: Any favorite ideas among this group? Other stocks you think are better plays on power, construction, metals or energy for AI and this “silicon dollar” idea of rebuilding US dominance? Let us know with a comment below… thanks for reading!

Disclosure: Of the companies mentioned above, I own shares of and/or call options on NVIDIA, Franco-Nevada, Elemental Royalty, Versamet Royalties, Vicor, Viper Energy, and Amrize. I will not trade in any covered stock for at least three days after publication, per Stock Gumshoe’s trading rules.