The AI Trade Has Landlords and Merchants
The AI trade has landlords and merchants.
Landlords the neoclouds. Own megawatts, rent raw GPUs wholesale to a handful of giant tenants. $IREN $CIFR $WYFI $NBIS
Merchants sell finished AI workloads retail: inference, agents, vector DBs, usage-priced, to hundreds of thousands of builders. No anchor-tenant risk the demand IS the ecosystem. $DOCN $NET $AKAM
Here are three public ways to own the merchant layer:
$DOCN, the growth cut: AI ARR +221%, over 80% of it platform not bare metal, guiding 50%+ growth for 2027. Cursor runs on it.
$NET, the premium cut: inference at the edge, the toll booth for agentic traffic, priced like the market already agrees.
$AKAM, the value cut: same playbook on a legacy CDN at a fraction of the multiple. Cheap optionality, slow engine.
Landlords get paid for the building. Merchants get paid every time a token moves.
Counter: merchants are building their own megawatts now $DOCN’s gross margin fell five points funding the capex, and the private inference clouds are coming for pricing.
