Earlom, An Iron Forge (1773), Art Institute of Chicago. CC0.

Issue 000 · Welcome

By the time you read this, SpaceX will have turned millions of retail investors into exit liquidity for early insiders, and this time you’re holding the bag directly, with up to a third of the float earmarked for retail. Early investors and over 4,000 employees become millionaires, 400 become centimillionaires, a handful become billionaires, and one might even become a trillionaire.

Your chance of making a return like any of these people is close to zero, but there is one way to get close: investing in the chokepoints before the rest of the market catches on.

Forget getting rich for a second. The more useful question is where the prize actually went, and the public market answers it cleanly.

If you’d invested in the S&P in 2013, you’d have 5x’d your money in 13 years. Not bad, but a more concentrated NASDAQ bet would’ve yielded 8.1x.

All sounds great, until you see that investing in an index of the top 10 stocks would have yielded 113x, a 40+% IRR, easily beating most top-quartile hedge funds. (Obviously you’d have had to keep tracking the top 10 as it changed over the years, but it’s useful as a thought exercise.)

Almost a dream: 113x on $10k makes you a millionaire in 13 years. That is, unless you’d gone all in on Nvidia and made a staggering 684x in that time frame.

The effect only amplifies from 2025 onwards: investing in the AI picks and shovels has made Leopold Aschenbrenner 12x on his money (1000% net of fees), and a Sandisk pick would’ve yielded 34x in the same period.

Notice the direction of travel. The whole market made you 5x, big tech 8x, the ten giants 113x, the single chipmaker 684x, and the infrastructure names since 2025 more still. The alpha was never in the apps. It compounded one layer down: in the compute, the power, the memory. When compute was the chokepoint, Nvidia and its virtual monopoly won. When memory became the chokepoint, Sandisk won. When electricity was the chokepoint, Bloom Energy won.

We’re sceptics of our own convictions and quite reserved investors, but even then we’re up 80% YTD on actual portfolio net worth, not just a tiny pot.

Though the majority of foundation model opportunities have stayed private for a while, there are thousands of public companies further down the AI supply chain that you could’ve bought into, and we’re here to help you find the next batch.

With the chokepoints.ai tool and newsletter, we’ve mapped the end-to-end AI value chain, its dependencies, and 6,000+ companies within it, so that you can understand what the core drivers, barriers and opportunities are. More importantly, we’ve highlighted the chokepoints: the areas within AI where the bottlenecks are greatest. Over the next few months, we’ll be dissecting these even further to build a more comprehensive view of both the strength of each chokepoint and its geopolitical status.

As co-authors, we’ve been fortunate to live in this world for a while now, one of us as a machine learning researcher at one of the UK’s leading AI labs, the other active in the Effective Altruism and AI safety movements since first year of undergrad at Oxford.

Beyond driving decent returns since we started actively managing our portfolio, the chokepoints thesis has led us to make even more radical decisions:

A word on why we bother, because this is a pillar of the whole project and not an aside.

There is an evolutionary mismatch between genes that change over generations and the exponential rate of progress in AI, and it is the core driver of humanity losing its status as the most powerful entity in the world. Just as we evolved from primates and eventually overpowered them, AI has evolved from humans and may overpower us. Understanding its chokepoints is the best way to make sure that you benefit from the technology rather than lose out to it. The chokepoints aren’t just where the returns are; they’re where the leverage is, the points at which this technology can still be steered, slowed, or governed.

We take that seriously. It is precisely why we would rather you understood this infrastructure than looked away from it.

So whether you’re just getting started in AI or investing, looking to start or buy a business, or managing billions, we’re here to give you a real understanding of the picks and shovels of AI, one level deeper than the chips - the places where the alpha is yet to be unlocked.

Subscribe for the map. And remember, if in doubt, the answer is 42.

Welcome to Chokepoints.