ALTR
Altair Engineering Inc. Class A Common Stock
stock NASDAQ

The difference is that the companies selling AI (including the foundational models down to small companies buying API reselling from them, etc) are private and so don’t publish financials and the public ones like Microsoft or Meta make it intentionally difficult to tease out revenue from AI services from their core operations. Back in the dotcom days these junk companies were public and you could see their cash burn with your own eyes, now it can only be surmised but in either case it’s widely known. The picks and shovels plays are very little different, if you look at the top 20 of the Nasdaq 100 by market cap were all profitable networking, fiber, telecoms and software stocks with massively inflated valuations. This is a fallacy I see a lot, the pets.coms were not the majority of the index then. Investors were focusing on the infrastructure then as they are now, and they still collapsed like they do during all CAPEX boom-bust cycles.
Top 20 holdings of Nasdaq 100 in 1999:
1. MSFT
2. CSCO
3. INTC
4. DELL
5. ORCL
6. QCOM
7. SUNW (Sun Micro)
8. WCOM
9. AMGN
10. JDSU (JDS uniphase)
11. AMAT
12. NXTL (Nextel)
13. Yahoo
14. AMZN
15. NTAP (Network Appliance Corp)
16. VRSN (verisign)
17. Comcast
18. SEBL (Siegel systems)
19 ALTR (Altera)
20. RNWk (Realnetwork)

The difference is that the companies selling AI (including the foundational models down to small companies buying API reselling from them, etc) are private and so don’t publish financials and the public ones like Microsoft or Meta make it intentionally difficult to tease out revenue from AI services from their core operations. Back in the dotcom days these junk companies were public and you could see their cash burn with your own eyes, now it can only be surmised but in either case it’s widely known. The picks and shovels plays are very little different, if you look at the top 20 of the Nasdaq 100 by market cap were all profitable networking, fiber, telecoms and software stocks with massively inflated valuations. This is a fallacy I see a lot, the pets.coms were not the majority of the index then. Investors were focusing on the infrastructure then as they are now, and they still collapsed like they do during all CAPEX boom-bust cycles.
Top 20 holdings of Nasdaq 100 in 1999:
1. MSFT
2. CSCO
3. INTC
4. DELL
5. ORCL
6. QCOM
7. SUNW (Sun Micro)
8. WCOM
9. AMGN
10. JDSU (JDS uniphase)
11. AMAT
12. NXTL (Nextel)
13. Yahoo
14. AMZN
15. NTAP (Network Appliance Corp)
16. VRSN (verisign)
17. Comcast
18. SEBL (Siegel systems)
19 ALTR (Altera)
20. RNWk (Realnetwork)