History’s Biggest Bottleneck Holds the Key to AI
Listen to the audio version of this article (generated by AI).
Michael’s note: In 1943, a handful of Norwegian commandos scaled an ice-covered cliff in the dark to destroy a Nazi power plant. Their target wasn’t the plant – it was a single chokepoint in Germany’s race for the bomb.
Joel Litman, Chief Investment Officer at our corporate affiliate Altimetry, argues the AI boom has a chokepoint of its own today – and almost everyone is looking in the wrong place.
Joel is a forensic accountant followed by 150 of the world’s top 300 money managers; his True Blue system strips out the accounting distortions that hide what a company is really earning.
Below, Joel walks through why electricity – not chips – is the real bottleneck in the AI race… and the small, unknown infrastructure companies his system flagged across the sector.
He and TradeSmith’s own Landon Swan reached the same short list from opposite directions, with catalysts converging around July 10.
The two went public with everything – all four companies, plus a fifth stock free – at The U.S. AI Super Summit this past Thursday. If you missed it live, watch the replay here.
Europe was on fire… the clock was ticking… and a small group of Norwegian commandos had one mission.
Shut down the Nazi power plant – or die trying.
The plant was called Vemork. Set into a cliff above the Måna River in Nazi-occupied Norway, it produced heavy water – a key component the Germans hoped to use in their nuclear reactor program.
An airborne raid three months earlier had ended in disaster. Two gliders carrying 48 British soldiers crash-landed in a storm. The Germans shot the survivors on the spot, and only 7 escaped death.
So the British recruited six Norwegian commandos to add to its team and tried something else entirely.
Their leader was Joachim Rønneberg, a 23-year-old ski instructor. He studied the valley and dismissed the most obvious way in: a heavily guarded bridge. To get his men inside without firing a shot, he devised an even more daring plan.
The cliff below the plant was unguarded. The Germans didn’t think anyone would try to climb it when temperatures fell to negative 4°F and the cliff face was coated in ice.
But one of Rønneberg’s team grew up in the area and knew a way up. And he led the team up approximately 500 feet of ice-covered rock in darkness, one handhold at a time.
They then squeezed inside through a cable duct, found the heavy water cells, and set 18 charges. Two minutes later, the explosion obliterated 1,500 pounds of heavy water and wrecked the equipment used to produce it – and the raiders skied away to safety.
The British understood that heavy water was a critical chokepoint in the race to the bomb. If they squeezed the Nazis at that specific point in the supply chain, they could stop them from winning.
And it worked. Production at Vemork shut down for more than a year – long enough for the U.S. to pull ahead and finish the bomb first.
Something similar is playing out in the race for AI. There’s a chokepoint here, too – and the companies positioned to solve it could be among the most explosive investments of the next decade.
It’s not heavy water this time. It’s electricity.
Winning the AI Arms Race
A hyperscaler AI data center uses as much power as an entire major city the size of Houston or Chicago.
The extra electricity the U.S. grid needs to generate by 2030 has grown sevenfold since 2022 – from 24 to 166 gigawatts – and data centers are driving more than half of that growth.
The gap between what the grid can supply and what AI demands is already large enough that the federal government is treating it as a national security problem.
In November 2025, President Trump signed an executive order launching the Genesis Mission – mobilizing all 17 Department of Energy National Laboratories… 40,000 government scientists… and the country’s most powerful supercomputers toward one objective: winning the AI race through energy dominance. The order described it as “comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project.”
He also invoked wartime powers under the Defense Production Act – directing billions toward grid infrastructure.
When the federal government mobilizes at wartime speed around a physical infrastructure problem, something predictable happens… The companies solving that problem don’t just grow. They get drafted.
Contracts flow. Backlogs build. Revenue tied to government and utility partnerships accelerates faster than the broader market can track.
And because the companies sitting at the center of a buildout like this are often small – obscure civil engineering firms, pipeline operators, substation builders – the market tends to find them late.
Distortion + Catalyst = Profits
I’ve been tracking this through my “True Blue” system for months. Here’s the short version of how it works:
Public companies report earnings using accounting rules that force them to record long-term investments as immediate expenses – making them look far less profitable than they actually are.
True Blue strips out those distortions to find what a company is actually generating. When the gap between reported earnings and real earnings is large, and a catalyst is about to force the market to notice, stocks tend to move explosively.
It’s happened before. Silicon Motion Technology (SIMO) had a near-100% earnings distortion when semiconductor demand was surging – the stock returned 1,605%.
Deckers Outdoor (DECK) had a 140% distortion during a boom in American footwear sales – 3,718%. Illumina (ILMN) had a 245% distortion as gene research was gaining traction – 4,517%.
Distortion plus catalyst. That’s the setup.
Right now, True Blue is flagging that same combination across a group of small, largely unknown infrastructure companies at the center of America’s AI energy buildout.
And last month, I found out I wasn’t the only one zeroing in on this market niche.
Two Systems, One Conclusion
In May, I was in Washington, D.C., for a closed-door investment conference.
That’s where I met Landon and Andy Swan – the brothers behind one of the most sophisticated consumer data operations in the country.
They built a system that tracks millions of social media posts, search trends, and web traffic data points every single day. They then distill all of it into a single number for every stock they follow – a Social Heat Score.
Landon showed me what his Social Heat Score was doing across the AI energy infrastructure sector. Search trends climbing. Website traffic building. Investor and industry conversations accelerating around a handful of small companies most of Wall Street had never heard of.
I took that sector back to True Blue and ran the financials on every microcap in it. What came back were some of the strongest earnings distortion signals my system has flagged in years – companies generating far more cash than their reported numbers suggested, sitting right at the center of a government-backed buildout.
Two systems with completely different data… both pointed at the same opportunity.
What We Found – And How to See It
Landon and I have identified four small, largely unknown companies sitting at the center of America’s AI energy buildout. Companies sitting at the center of a trend his Social Heat Score identified months ago – small, largely unknown businesses with the kind of earnings distortions True Blue flagged when I ran the financials across the sector. Most investors haven’t found them yet.
That’s exactly the point.
Three powerful market catalysts are set to converge around July 10. We believe the window to get positioned ahead of them is open right now – and it won’t stay open for long.
Landon and I went public with everything we found at The U.S. A.I. Summit – all four companies, the catalysts, and the full thesis. We also gave away the name and ticker of a fifth stock, completely free.
If you missed it live, you can watch the full replay here.
Regards,
Joel Litman
Chief Investment Officer, Altimetry
P.S. There’s one thing I didn’t get into above. One of the three catalysts converging on July 10 has a 100% track record of sending stocks higher dating back 76 years. It has only triggered twice before – and both times the market surged. I walk through all three catalysts in detail in the replay. Watch it here.