When investors think about a major technological shift, they often focus on the companies everyone can see.
Companies like the ones building the aircraft, developing the models, or shipping the product that comes to define the era. Those companies matter, and they often become the recognizable leaders of the period. But every major shift I have studied depends on something underneath it: the infrastructure, materials, and supply chains that make the visible part possible in the first place. That is where I think the next set of opportunities is quietly forming.
Defense modernization is a clear example of what I mean. For decades, defense investing meant the companies building finished systems: aircraft, ships, vehicles, and advanced platforms. That definition is broadening now, because next-generation defense capability increasingly depends on something more basic: whether the critical minerals, battery technology, and manufacturing capacity required to build those systems actually exist domestically.
This does not appear to be a theoretical shift. The Department of Defense's Office of Strategic Capital has committed $1.2 billion in conditional loans this year to support domestic rare earth processing, including a $725 million loan toward a new U.S. rare earth separation and metallization facility.¹ Separately, the Defense Logistics Agency has moved to secure battery supply chains directly, issuing a solicitation for up to $300 million in battery-grade lithium carbonate to build a strategic stockpile.² This year's defense authorization act went further still, adding new critical minerals to the Pentagon's formal sourcing restrictions and tightening where advanced battery components are allowed to come from.³ These are capital commitments and legislated policy, not talk — a real signal about where the government believes the actual vulnerability sits.
The investment implication follows naturally: defense exposure isn't limited anymore to the companies producing the finished platform. It extends further down the chain, to the materials and infrastructure that let those platforms get built at all.
I'd argue the same framework applies just as directly to artificial intelligence. Most of the public conversation centers on the companies building the models themselves. But AI adoption depends on a much larger ecosystem underneath that: semiconductor manufacturing, data centers, the power grid, and advanced computing capacity. The five largest technology companies alone plan to spend nearly $700 billion on capital expenditures this year, most of it aimed at AI infrastructure.⁴ Memory chips show the pressure most directly. As much as 70% of global production in 2026 is now expected to go toward AI data centers alone, tightening supply for nearly every other electronics category that depends on the same components.⁵ The International Energy Agency projects data center electricity consumption globally will more than double by 2030 for the same reason.⁶ None of that is a software story. It's a materials, energy, and infrastructure story, and the companies enabling it do not appear to be the ones getting the headlines.
This is the same framework behind several of our strategies. The objective was never simply to identify companies riding a popular narrative — it was to understand the full ecosystem being built around a transformative technology, and to look for the businesses positioned inside that structure, not just at the top of it.
I believe innovation never happens in isolation. Every real breakthrough depends on a network of companies supplying the resources and capacity that let it scale. So, the question worth asking isn't only "who's building the next breakthrough." It's also "who's building what makes that breakthrough possible." In my experience, that's often where the next generation of market leaders actually comes from.
Learn more about how Yorkville America's rules-based ETF strategies are built at yorkvilleamerica.com.