Inference wins, narratives rotate

Semis Rip While Software Sinks

Markets are once again rallying on semiconductors, while software is being treated as yesterday's trade. Capital continues to crowd into compute, memory, and infrastructure names as visibility around AI capex remains strong. Software, by contrast, is acting like a funding source as investors rotate toward assets with clearer near-term demand signals.

The takeaway is not that software is broken, but that timing matters. In this phase of the cycle, markets are rewarding physical bottlenecks and hard capacity, not long-duration growth stories. That dynamic can persist longer than fundamentals alone would suggest.

Cloudflare and DigitalOcean on AI Inference

(NYSE:NET) and (NYSE:DOCN) continue to surface as inference beneficiaries rather than pure training plays. The conversation around them centers on proximity to users, latency, and real-time workloads, not massive GPU clusters. Inference favors distributed networks and efficient delivery, which is where these platforms differentiate.

This is a quieter AI story, but an important one. As models move from labs into production, inference becomes about cost, speed, and scale at the edge. That shifts value toward platforms already embedded in the flow of traffic.

Anything Anthropic Touches Turns to Gold

The market is increasingly treating anything connected to Anthropic as strategically important. The perception is that Anthropic represents the "enterprise-safe" AI path, pulling demand toward partners across cloud, infrastructure, and tooling. That association alone has become a signal for future deal flow.

This matters because ecosystems compound. When capital, talent, and customers cluster around a model provider, second-order beneficiaries often outperform expectations. Right now, Anthropic sits at the center of that gravity well, and markets are pricing accordingly.

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Benzinga Disclaimer: This article is from an unpaid external contributor. It does not represent Benzinga’s reporting and has not been edited for content or accuracy.