Lens Technology is the world’s largest processor of glass for consumer electronics. Based in Changsha, China, the company employs 145,000 people and has factories across multiple Chinese provinces.1 Lens is one of two key suppliers of touchscreens to Apple, alongside long-standing Chinese rival Biel Crystal. It is also a key supplier to Samsung and a particularly important supplier to Xiaomi, for whom Lens also does whole-device assembly of the latter’s premium smartphones. Glass is not just key for smartphones and other touchscreen devices: its unique physical, optical, and thermal properties make it a crucial engineering material in future plans for robotics, augmented reality devices, and advanced semiconductors for artificial intelligence. Lens is currently expanding out of touchscreens into these and other areas, already manufacturing entire humanoid robots for Chinese companies and likely parts for Tesla’s robots too, and working with Intel and Samsung on advanced glass substrates and “through glass vias” (TGVs) to further increase the performance of cutting-edge AI chips. With a net worth of around $17 billion, Lens’ founder and CEO Zhou Qunfei is the world’s wealthiest self-made female entrepreneur due to her majority ownership of Lens, which is publicly traded with a market capitalization of around $25 billion (300433.SZ) as of October 2026.2

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In just a couple weeks, we will issue the 250th Bismarck Brief. This is the fourth year we can evaluate the Briefs like a data set of their own, allowing us, to a degree, to evaluate our own analytic performance. One interesting and easily-answered question is: what happens to the stock prices of publicly-traded companies after they are profiled in Bismarck Brief?

Above is a graph of the share price performance of every publicly-traded company covered in Bismarck Brief—all 74 of them, give or take—since the date it was covered to September 28, 2026. Bismarck Brief is not financial or investment advice (see full disclaimer below).1 But, generally, a positive assessment of institutional functionality or live player strategy in the context of business will eventually be reflected by the wider markets as well, as the fruits of such functionality become widely recognized.

If one had invested the same amount of funds into each company that Bismarck Brief positively assessed on the date the corresponding Brief was published, one would have invested 53 times and the total investment would have grown by +146%. Had one instead invested into the S&P 500 the same number of times on those same dates, it would have grown only +51%, a nearly three times lower rate of return. Had one taken the same total amount of invested funds and instead put them into the S&P 500 all at once when Bismarck Brief began publishing, then left them alone, the total investment also would have grown only +61%.

The most striking empirical outcome, however, is that if one had invested the same amount of funds only into the 27 publicly-traded companies Bismarck Brief evaluated specifically as live players, one’s total investment would have grown a staggering +205%, compared to just +60% for the equivalent investments into the S&P 500.

For several years, the attention of many of the world’s live players has been intensely focused on the development of artificial intelligence technology, which itself relies on the global semiconductor industry. Bismarck Brief has been investigating live players in semiconductors and AI since 2022—four years now—and, if one had invested the same amount of funds only into the 28 semiconductor and AI-related companies covered by Bismarck Brief, one’s total investment would have grown an even more staggering +233%, compared to just +49% for the equivalent investments into the S&P 500. Such figures suggest the attentive Brief reader is well upstream of the passive market investor.

The Brief only evaluates institutions that are plausibly strategically important, so the decision to profile a company at all means it is worth attention, whether or not its valuation subsequently grows or declines. If one had invested the same amount of funds into each company Bismarck Brief covered, whether positive or negative, one would have invested 74 times and the total investment would have grown by +116%, compared to +51% for the equivalent investments into the S&P 500.

Every investment strategy is necessarily far more idiosyncratic and developed in practice than this simple thought experiment. But this shows that Bismarck Brief can provide a unique and useful perspective for investors that is upstream of markets, even though our focus is exclusively on investigating the structures of institutions and strategies of live players.

Bismarck Brief wrote and issued in-depth investigations of multiple of the best-performing publicly-traded companies of recent years immediately prior to meteoric rises in their stock prices. Our Brief on Nvidia was sent to our paid subscribers on December 14, 2022. Since then, Nvidia’s share price has grown an incredible +1399%. Our Brief on Palantir was sent on May 15, 2024. Since then, Palantir’s share price has grown +790%. Our Brief on Meta was sent on February 15, 2023, during a low point of market expectations for the company’s future and strategy. Since then, Meta’s share price has grown +338%. Once is a fluke. Twice is a coincidence. But three or more times is the indication of valuable knowledge.

Nvidia is an extreme positive outlier. But so was the Brief’s exceptionally positive assessment of Nvidia’s technological leadership. The Brief concluded:

[...] insofar as the computationally intensive deep learning model of AI is the most promising to usher in an AI revolution in technology and industry, Nvidia is one of the most promising companies poised to benefit from it.

Jensen Huang has shown an ability to undertake long-term, highly risky changes in strategy and achieve a massive payoff that places Nvidia at the center of a very promising market and justifies its enormous valuation. Increased governmental constraints through antitrust and export controls constrain Nvidia’s future vertical integration, but should not hinder its expansion based on its current model, so long as demand for powerful GPUs and other chips continues to increase. Nvidia’s enviable position is leading many would-be competitors to challenge it, but so long as Jensen Huang proves to be a live player while in charge of the company, Nvidia will probably be capable of weathering any competition, whether by simply outcompeting established giants or buying out small startup challengers.

Similarly, the Brief was exceptionally positive about another positive outlier, Palantir, concluding that:

Under Karp, Palantir has been a live player. At 56 years old, Karp is unlikely to leave the company anytime soon, but is rather in the midst of a years-long and successful strategy to grow the company’s commercial client base under “unrelenting demand,” in Karp’s own words. In 2018, Palantir hired its first-ever salespeople and Karp described the company as “going into adolescence.” In the fourth quarter of 2023, Palantir reported a profit for the first time. The company is likely to derive more revenue from commercial clients rather than government ones for the first time ever in the next few years. For both types of clients, Palantir’s provision of fundamental organizational and decision-making software, as well as the necessary expertise to maintain or update it, means that Palantir will, over time, become a difficult-to-displace incumbent that benefits from institutional inertia. So long as Palantir itself remains lean and maintains its unique brand, this will also likely result in high margins.

Many have an instinctive resistance to the idea that the greatest financial returns accrue from just a few bets that, years down the line, become perceived as obvious in hindsight. There is a sense that it couldn’t be, or shouldn’t be, so simple. Yet careful observers of both startups and stock markets have long known that the most outsized financial returns always come from just a tiny few paradigm-shifting companies led by live players. It was not luck that determined that Bismarck Brief would investigate Nvidia or Palantir before these companies captured the attention of the world’s investors, but our methodical investigation of the organizations making the world’s most dazzling technological advances possible.

Day in and day out, the team behind Bismarck Brief tirelessly searches for the world’s most technologically and strategically impactful companies, and the live players behind them. I warmly invite those who wish to know the results of our search, in detail and every Wednesday at 2pm GMT sharp, to become paid subscribers today:

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It is impossible to ignore that the single biggest story by far in both technology and investing since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022 has been AI and the semiconductor industry that powers it. As of late 2026, companies not just like Nvidia, but also Intel, TSMC, and ASML have become household names, at least in certain tech and finance circles. Much of the stock price performance of companies profiled in Bismarck Brief comes from the fact that they are semiconductor or AI-related companies, which Bismarck Brief not infrequently investigated not months but entire years before they became “priced in.”

Our Brief on Nvidia was so early it was released not more than two weeks after ChatGPT itself was made available to the public. Then we issued our first Brief on the world’s foremost semiconductor foundry and Nvidia’s key manufacturing partner, Taiwan’s TSMC, a few weeks later in January 2023. It is since up +430%. That company’s closest competitor is South Korea’s Samsung—our Brief on Samsung was issued a few months later in April 2023. It is since up +345%. Both companies are totally reliant on advanced photolithography machines made by one company: the Netherlands’ ASML, on which we issued a Brief in November 2023. It is since up +173%.

By the end of 2024, we had issued Briefs on Tokyo Electron (+71%), Arm (+150%), Intel (+514%), AMD (+256%), SMIC (+137%), and Broadcom (+123%). In our Brief on Yandex from May 2024, which we assessed as a live player during the time its founders were in control, we even noted that while one founder was deceased and the other forced out of the company by the Russian government, this latter founder was taking his fortune, much of the company’s best talents, and some of its most advanced AI projects to the Netherlands to potentially reinvent his company. One of the projects we noted is now one of the world’s best-known “neoclouds,” Nebius. It is up +1113% since then. In late 2025, we began a systematic study of China’s top AI labs. We published our Brief on Z.ai, the company behind the GLM family of AI models, in November 2025. It went public in January 2026 and jumped some sixteen times its initial price in six months, though it is now up only a comparatively paltry +287%.

Bismarck Brief is not a semiconductor or AI newsletter per se. In fact, all of the semiconductor and AI-related Briefs we have ever issued combined would be just a fraction of our total output, which covers literally the entire global strategic landscape in all its facets, be they technological, economic, political, ideological, scientific, or cultural. Nor have we yet exhausted the list of all possibly relevant semiconductor or AI companies. Nor, for that matter, have we deliberately focused on semiconductor companies that can be traded—one of our most important and widely-read semiconductor Briefs was on the German optics company and key ASML supplier Carl Zeiss, which has been foundation-owned for generations.

But, through our methodical, theory-driven approach, based on the principles of Great Founder Theory, we were able to turn our attention to the most important companies such as Nvidia, TSMC, Intel, Samsung, or ASML—and explain their significance to our readers—years before they became “priced in” by everyone else. In fact, much of the boom is simply in downstream suppliers to Nvidia, which we covered in late 2022: one could have easily and logically invested not just in Nvidia but its suppliers too. Once again, the most important story in investing is largely the handiwork of a single live player, namely Jensen Huang. This, more than anything, is the wonderful vindication of our approach that I am pleased to see. I hope our readers ask themselves: what Briefs am I reading on live players and companies today that, in two, three, or four years’ time, everyone else will suddenly be talking about? With Bismarck Brief, we aim to send you breaking news years before it is published.

Compared to when we performed the same analyses of stock price performance in 2023, 2024, and 2025, Bismarck Brief has not just consistently outperformed, but performed better and better every year. In 2024, we found that the sum of investments and returns on investment of investing in live players profiled in the Brief were 1.56x of the equivalent for the repeated same dates or one-time investment into the S&P 500—whichever is greater that year, for comparison’s sake—while in 2025 they were 1.84x greater and, in 2026, they were 1.89x greater. The figures for positively-assessed companies grew from 1.19x in 2023 to 1.53x in 2026, while for all profiled companies the figures grew from 1.12x to 1.34x. Bismarck Brief has beaten the S&P 500 every year, beaten it harder every year, and beaten it harder the more positively and confidently we assess a company every year.

Bismarck Brief is not financial advice. It is not intended to be, nor will it ever be. The Brief researches and analyzes the fundamentals of institutional structure, leadership, and strategy, sometimes for publicly-traded companies, but also for every other kind of key institution, whether it is a private company, government bureaucracy, nonprofit foundation, family office, defense contractor, media outlet, microstate, or something else. These institutions, and the specific and unique people behind them, are the discrete forces that make up what we call “fundamentals.”

Markets do not care about fundamentals themselves. The valuations of public companies are driven by the capricious swings in the collective moods of retail and also institutional investors—the widespread adoption of metrics like ESG demonstrates that political considerations play a significant role as well. The market itself is a dead player, whose expectations are routinely surprised and outmaneuvered by live players. Returns come not from aligning with the consensus of passive investors, but by aligning with live players who successfully change that consensus.

The methodical and careful application of our unique theory can help investors ground intuitions and set expectations of the future so they too can think like live players. The legendary investor George Soros famously viewed his investing strategy as popping the epistemic bubbles of false but widespread beliefs. Such a feat necessarily requires the unique knowledge, social information, and final judgment of an individual investor. But to evaluate a belief as false, one must first have a solid grounding in true fundamentals. In this way, Bismarck Brief can crucially help investors, much in the same way as it provides a strategic perspective to companies, philanthropists, and governments.

What does the future hold for us a few years from now? In recent months, Brief subscribers have received in-depth investigations on SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, Meta’s frontier AI lab, the vital importance of neoclouds to AI startups, Masayoshi Son’s alliance with Sam Altman and OpenAI, the enormous AI chips of Cerebras, potential great leaps in brain-computer interfaces, China’s cheap humanoid robots, new oil drilling methods, Britain’s last inventor, Chinese memory chips, the rapid roboticization of ground warfare, and the potential of light-based computing. There is more to come and, personally, I have no doubt that we are more likely than not to be thinking about these same topics years from now. Why wait to get informed?

If you are not already a paid subscriber to Bismarck Brief, I warmly invite you to subscribe today and join us on this ongoing investigation into the global power landscape:

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I wish all our readers and supporters a warm and pleasant fall season!

Sincerely,

Samo Burja

Founder and President, Bismarck Analysis

Marine or maritime nuclear technology refers broadly to the deployment of compact nuclear reactors at sea, such as aboard ships to act as a form of propulsion or aboard floating platforms to act as mobile power plants. At present, there are over 160 active nuclear-powered vessels utilizing more than 200 small nuclear reactors.1 Most of these are naval warships, in particular nuclear submarines, but there are also a handful of aircraft carriers and miscellaneous warships, alongside an even smaller number of icebreakers and other civilian ships.2 Russia’s Akademik Lomonosov floating nuclear power plant (FNPP) has also provided electricity to remote Siberian locales since 2020. Although we are used to thinking of nuclear power as something that must be built and deployed on land, marine nuclear reactors are in fact as old as nuclear technology itself. As the developed world faces mounting geopolitical energy crises and institutional dysfunction in industrial construction, deploying nuclear power at sea promises to be an effective way to circumvent both in the pursuit of economic growth. Both Chinese and South Korean firms, in particular, have unveiled plans for building nuclear-powered cargo ships.3

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Small modular reactors (SMRs) are classified by industry convention as nuclear reactors with the capacity to generate up to 300 megawatts (MW) of electricity—as opposed to the conventional 1 gigawatt (GW) size of a reactor—and that are designed at least to some significant degree for mass production and assembly of parts.1 These reactors are meant to offer a number of advantages over conventional gigawatt-scale nuclear plants: smaller upfront investment, lower construction costs due to standardized manufacturing, and faster deployment timelines. In the face of geopolitical energy crises and rising electricity demand from AI data centers, the second Trump administration is attempting to catalyze a major expansion of nuclear power, what it calls a “nuclear renaissance.”2 By executive order, President Donald Trump has explicitly set a target of increasing U.S. nuclear capacity from 100 GW to 400 GW by 2050.3 Yet, with large-scale conventional nuclear plant construction apparently all but impossible in the United States, renewed interest in nuclear power is instead being predominantly directed towards the research, development, and construction of small modular reactor concepts.

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This Bismarck Brief will contribute to our exclusive upcoming AI 2026 Bismarck Strategic Report, which will feature in-depth analysis of the state of the artificial intelligence sector and technology, together with a comprehensive profile of key players. Upgrade or subscribe now to receive full access and never miss a report.

All computing relies on the rapid transmission of signals, from the scale of a single chip to the scale of the global internet. There are essentially two kinds of signals used in digital computing today: electrical and optical. Electrical signals use changes in voltage and current along a transmission line. Optical signals use light. Both of these signals are types of disturbances in the electromagnetic field and so both actually travel at appreciable and comparable fractions of the speed of light in a vacuum, the fastest thing in the universe. Electrical signals are generally transmitted using copper wiring as a conductor, surrounded by insulating “dielectric” material to maintain signal integrity. Optical signals are generally transmitted as light through specialized glass or plastic “fiber optic” cables. Both electrical and optical signals are crucial to the vast computing infrastructure needed for the computing demand of the present day, including for artificial intelligence. Broadly, electrical signals are used at short distances while optical signals are used at long distances, but semiconductor companies are exploring ways to integrate the advantages of optical components into more parts of the technology stack of AI data centers.

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The term “unmanned ground vehicle” (UGV) is broadly used to refer to any military vehicle that lacks a physically present human operator—a ground drone. UGVs were deployed at scale by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan for bomb disposal operations and have been used by Israel in both combat and engineering roles in the ongoing Gaza war. But the largest numbers and greatest innovation have been in the Russia-Ukraine war, for logistics, medical evacuations, engineering, and combat roles alike. Ukraine deployed around 10,000-15,000 ground drones in 2025 and is aiming to produce another 50,000 in 2026, with its stated goal that ground drones eventually take over all logistics operations.1 As of early September 2026, Ukraine recorded over 112,000 ground drone logistics and evacuation missions completed since the start of the year.2 In the most well-known cases, Ukrainian ground drones have rescued wounded soldiers trapped dozens of kilometers behind the frontline and held positions with automated machine guns for weeks at a time.3 Continued advances in battery, robotics, telecommunications, and semiconductor technology raise the possibility of substantially replacing frontline human soldiers with robotic equivalents.

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With over $117 billion in assets under management as of August 2026, Iconiq Capital (stylized as ICONIQ) is one of the largest family offices in the world.1 Family offices are privately-held companies that manage the personal fortunes of particular wealthy individuals or families. Iconiq is a “multi-family office” that serves many wealthy people rather than just one. Although the firm unsurprisingly does not disclose details about its clients, it does report nearly four hundred high-net-worth clients, with known current and former clients including many prominent tech figures such as Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg; Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang; leading Effective Altruism donor Dustin Moskovitz; LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman; Twitter founder Jack Dorsey; outspoken investor Chamath Palihapitiya; Joshua Kushner, investor and brother of U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner; James Murdoch, investor and brother of Fox Corporation’s head Lachlan Murdoch; and a number of celebrities including Tom Cruise, Will Smith, Justin Timberlake, Ashton Kutcher, and others. Iconiq stands out among family offices for counting multiple high-profile tech names as clients and for making sometimes large investments into hot venture-backed companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Anduril, and Stripe.

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Memory chips allow computing devices including smartphones, personal computers, servers, and high-performing artificial intelligence chips like Nvidia’s GPUs to store data that is used to perform computations. This crucial function makes memory chips roughly as large and valuable a part of the semiconductor industry as “logic chips” like GPUs and CPUs, with both market sizes in 2025 estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars.1 Since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 and the ensuing wave of optimism about AI technology, makers of AI chips have seen skyrocketing revenues, profits, and valuations as Silicon Valley companies rush to build data centers to develop and host their AI services. Since 2025, this boom has spilled over into the memory chip industry too, creating memory supply shortages and boosting memory companies from the United States, South Korea, and Japan, but also younger and state-backed Chinese competitors, raising fears of a Chinese-driven supply glut if not even permanent competitive advance in the future. The two key Chinese memory chip manufacturers are ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) and Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC)—CXMT went public in July 2026 and is now valued at around $600 billion (688825.SS) while YMTC plans to go public in 2027.2

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Mercedes-Benz Group is the most valuable German automobile manufacturer as of August 2026, with a market capitalization of around €44 billion (MBG.DE).1 The company primarily makes high-end and luxury vehicles at relatively large scale: in 2025, it sold 2.16 million vehicles across the world and generated €132 billion of revenue, primarily across Europe, the United States, and China.2 For comparison, the world’s top auto maker by production volume is Toyota, which made over 11 million vehicles in 2025, while Tesla made 1.6 million cars for the year. Mercedes-Benz currently has around 164,000 employees and is among the largest private employers in Germany.3 For most of its history, Mercedes-Benz formed part of a larger company with Daimler, a truck manufacturer, and the company was known as Daimler-Benz. In 2019, however, Daimler was spun off to form an independent company, Daimler Trucks, although Mercedes-Benz retains a 30% stake.4 The company also owns the luxury vehicle marque Maybach. Mercedes-Benz has a reputation for elite German engineering and is both a jewel and bellwether of the German economy, itself the heart of Europe’s $23 trillion economy: Mercedes-Benz is the world’s first and oldest automobile company, tracing its origins back to 1883 when German engineer Carl Benz founded the first-ever auto maker Benz & Cie.5

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Sir James Dyson is one of the wealthiest people in the United Kingdom, with a net worth of approximately $20 billion as of August 2026, and is one of the few to have gained their wealth from manufacturing technologically advanced hardware products.1 Dyson’s fortune stems from the company Dyson Limited, which he founded in 1991 and which designs, manufactures, and sells a range of high-end consumer goods. In particular, Dyson has achieved worldwide recognition for inventing and popularizing the bagless cyclonic home vacuum cleaner, which is now considered the standard mechanism design for consumer vacuum cleaners in general, as well as producing a line of innovative, high-performance hair dryers and other hair care devices that have achieved tremendous popularity as beauty products and have been widely imitated in recent years. With 2025 revenues of £6.1 billion (roughly $8.3 billion), Dyson stands out as a large, dynamic, founder-led Western company not just competing in but driving trends and developments in advanced manufactured consumer goods, as a company that did not originate from Silicon Valley and in an era when such goods are usually considered mature products easily undercut by more efficient East Asian manufacturers.2

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Approximately 53% of all ships built in the world by gross tonnage are built in China; only 0.1% are built in the United States.1 In February 2026, the U.S. government for the first time released a plan to revitalize the U.S. shipbuilding industry, with the goals of increasing shipbuilding capacity and decoupling the U.S. and its allies from reliance on Chinese shipbuilding capacity.2 According to the plan, the objective is not just to “grow the number of vessels built in the United States,” but to “reconstitute a resilient [military-industrial base] capable of self-sustained production, rapid mobilization in crises, and competitive international performance.”3 This plan comes at the same moment that Chinese shipbuilding firms have reached a critical mass of market share, with approximately 64% of the global orderbook in terms of gross tonnage in 2025.4 Chinese shipbuilding firms include COSCO Heavy Industry—the shipbuilding arm of the shipping giant COSCO—and Yangzijiang Shipbuilding, the largest privately-owned shipbuilder in China, but the most notable is the China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC), a massive state-owned conglomerate which controls nearly one-fifth of total global shipbuilding capacity.5

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Enhanced oil recovery (EOR) is a suite of techniques for maximizing production from oil fields after conventional extraction techniques have been exhausted. Oil production relies on the differential between pressure underground in the oil well and at the surface, and this pressure differential can be maintained via “secondary recovery techniques” such as waterflooding or gas injection. EOR, in contrast, aims to change the chemical properties of the remaining oil by injecting one of a number of possible gases into the well, lowering the viscosity of the remaining oil and increasing pressure in the well. If enhanced oil recovery, in particular carbon dioxide-based techniques, could be applied at scale to the United States’ massive unconventional shale oil resources, the effect could be the equivalent of growing the current U.S. oil supply by around 50% or possibly even more, likely extending U.S. energy independence and exports for several more decades and reducing global reliance on oil from the Middle East. A handful of U.S. companies are on the forefront of developing enhanced oil recovery technology, most notably Occidental Petroleum, also commonly known as Oxy (OXY).

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By volume of humanoid robots shipped, the largest humanoid robotics company in the world is China’s Unitree. Founded in August 2016 in Hangzhou by currently 36-year-old Wang Xingxing, who remains CEO today, the company makes both bipedal and quadruped robots across a number of different product lines. Its G1 and H2 robots have repeatedly gone viral on social media and earned worldwide publicity thanks to events like their February 2026 display at the China Media Group’s Spring Gala Festival, where the robots demonstrated high levels of coordination and agility in a choreographed dance routine. In total, the company has sold around 10,000 humanoid robots to date, including 5500 in 2025 alone, and has also sold at least 33,000 quadrupeds.1 None of Unitree’s competitors, both U.S. and Chinese, have managed to sell anything like this quantity of robots—most have sold closer to 3000 robots in total. Unitree employs around 500 people, over one-third of them in R&D roles.2 Unitree intends to go public on the Shanghai stock exchange in 2026 at a valuation of around $6 billion.3

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In January 2024, Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface (BCI) company Neuralink implanted its first device into a human recipient’s brain, allowing a 29-year-old man paralyzed below the shoulder, Noland Arbaugh, to control a computer cursor with his thoughts and, among other things, play computer games like online chess, Civilization, and even first-person shooters.1 Since then, at least twenty additional paralyzed recipients have received Neuralink implants, allowing them to control not just cursors but computer keyboards and even robotic arms.2 While Neuralink is the most prominent BCI company, it is far from alone. In March 2026, the Chinese government designated BCIs a technological priority for the country and also approved the world’s first commercially-available invasive BCI, made by Shanghai-based company Neuracle; other such devices remain approved only for clinical trials.3 In June 2026, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta released a study showing it could decode more than half of words typed by a subject using only noninvasive magnetic sensors.4 The further development of this technology promises not just transformative medical devices but also hands-free input to computers and new training data for AI—first steps on an envisioned path of merging human mind and body with machine.

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Gas turbines are types of internal combustion engines that convert chemical energy from natural gas into mechanical rotation that a generator then converts into electricity. Gas is the world’s second-largest energy source for power generation, behind only coal: in 2025 gas power plants worldwide generated around 7000 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity, compared to around 10,500 TWh for coal plants.1 Such power plants are especially important in regions such as the United States where, due to the fracking revolution, natural gas remains cheap and abundant, and also in many European countries where regulatory factors have combined to drive coal and nuclear power plants out of operation. Similar U.S. regulations mean that the recent significant increase for U.S. electricity demand, which was close to stagnant for two decades, and is driven primarily by AI data center construction, will be met through burning natural gas, driving rapidly expanding demand for gas turbines.

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Cerebras is a U.S. semiconductor company that, in 2019, made computing history by successfully creating the physically largest-ever computer chip.1 An Nvidia H100 chip, first released in 2022, is roughly 814 square millimeters large—small enough to sit on a fingertip. In comparison, Cerebras’ “Wafer-Scale Engines” are over 46,000 square millimeters in size, well over fifty times larger than Nvidia’s chips and large enough to be held with both hands. The idea behind building massive computer chips is very simple: electrical signals between transistors on a single large chip must move far less distance than signals moving across many smaller chips connected with external networking components, making a single chip not just faster and more powerful but also more economical, using less electricity. Cerebras used a novel design to circumvent existing semiconductor design and manufacturing constraints, and says its chips are twenty times faster than Nvidia’s chips at running AI models, allowing instantaneous responses with no wait-time for users; its chips have won a major customer in OpenAI, which agreed to buy $20 billion of Cerebras chips in April 2026.2

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With a market capitalization of over $2 trillion (TSM), Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is the most valuable semiconductor manufacturing company in the world as of May 2026.1 The company is considered a chip “foundry” that does not design any computer chips but only manufactures them on contract for other companies, including “fabless” semiconductor companies like Nvidia and AMD. TSMC singlehandedly dominates global production of the world’s most advanced and computationally powerful computer chips and its dominance has not just held but grown in recent years: its share of global foundry revenue has grown from 59% in 2020 to 72% as of late 2025—with second-ranked Samsung dwarfed in comparison with a market share of just 7%—and its market share reaching even higher with greater chip sophistication.2 At present, the entire leading edge of artificial intelligence technology is dependent on TSMC’s manufacturing capabilities as well as its ability to scale up production quickly, and by extension so are the fortunes of many of the world’s most valuable companies including Nvidia and Apple.

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TotalEnergies, until recently known as Total, is one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies. The French corporation has a market capitalization of around $200 billion (TTE) as of May 2026, and generated $182 billion of revenue in 2025, making it the largest company in France by revenue.1 Since current CEO Patrick Pouyanné started his tenure in 2014, Total’s market capitalization has more than tripled, outperforming all of its “Big Oil” competitors, including ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP.2 Total has a little over 100,000 employees in over one hundred countries.3 In 2025, the company produced around 2.5 million barrels of oil equivalent per day across both its oil and gas production operations, which means that Total operates at a scale comparable to some of the world’s largest oil and gas producing countries: Norway, for instance, produced around 4 million barrels of oil equivalent per day in 2025.4 Because of the disappearance of Russian pipeline gas from the European market due to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and accompanying sanctions on Russia, Total has become a much more strategically important company for Europe.

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With annual revenues of $261 billion and over 800,000 employees, Foxconn is one of the largest companies in the world by both revenue and headcount and the largest such company from Taiwan.1 Foxconn is a contract electronics manufacturer that produces billions of individual electronic devices and components annually, with production tallies as high as 5.8 billion items in 2021.2 Holding an estimated 30-40% of global market share for contract manufacturing of electronics, Foxconn produces everything from smartphones to computers to video game consoles for companies like Amazon, Huawei, Sony, Dell, and Apple—the latter of which has been its most important customer for over a decade thanks to the success of the iPhone.3 Since 2023, Foxconn has also become the main electronics manufacturing partner for Nvidia, turning Nvidia’s powerful chips into completed server products that fill the halls of data centers for artificial intelligence.

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Rheinmetall is the largest and most valuable German defense conglomerate, with a market capitalization of nearly $80 billion (RHM.DE) as of May 2026.1 Although it has a recently-acquired shipbuilding arm and has expanded into large-scale ammunition production, it is primarily a designer and manufacturer of armored vehicles and related weapons systems, which are key to moving infantry around the battlefield. In 2024, Rheinmetall was the world’s twentieth-largest defense company by total arms sales revenues and the third largest dedicated defense company in Europe after French firm Thales and Italian manufacturer Leonardo.2 Due to rapidly increasing European defense spending since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Rheinmetall’s revenues have risen by over 50% in the last five years, from over €6 billion in 2019 to almost €10 billion in 2025, driving its share price up over 1700% in the same time period and making it one of the best-performing stocks in Europe.3 The company’s CEO was reportedly targeted for assassination by the Russian security services for its assistance to Ukraine.4 The company has approximately 44,000 employees, of which approximately half are based in Germany.5

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