The AI trade has landlords and merchants
The AI trade has landlords and merchants.
Landlords are the neoclouds. They own megawatts and rent raw GPUs wholesale to a handful of giant tenants: IREN, CIFR, WYFI and NBIS. Their economics look like a building owner’spower, sites and contracts first, utilization second.
Merchants sell finished AI workloads at retail: inference, agents, vector databases and usage-priced services to hundreds of thousands of builders. There is no anchor-tenant risk because the demand is the ecosystem. DOCN is the growth cut, NET the premium edge cut, and AKAM the value cut on a legacy CDN.
The distinction matters. Landlords get paid for the building. Merchants get paid every time a token moves. But merchants are building their own megawatts now, and funding that capex can pressure gross margins.
The screen is contracts, customer concentration and the path to cash flow. Own the layer whose risks you understand, and remember that a theme can be right while a stock is priced wrong. DYOR. Not FA.
