How to Invest in America’s “AI Factories” of the Future 

By Keith Kaplan

Listen to the audio version of this article (generated by AI).

 

On a flat stretch of Texas farmland 30 miles southwest of Houston, Foxconn is building a factory unlike any other in the United States. 

When the line starts moving early next year, it will make one of the most valuable products ever to roll off an American assembly line: a 3,000-pound steel cabinet packed with 72 of Nvidia’s most powerful AI chips. 

Nvidia (NVDA) calls them “AI factories in a box” — a single rack the size of a large refrigerator that does the work of an entire room of older servers. 

And each one carries a price tag of about $5 million. 

One of these racks on its own is fast enough to run ChatGPT, Gemini, and the other AI models reshaping every industry on Earth.  

Microsoft just networked 64 of them together to create an AI supercomputer for OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT. It can train an advanced AI model in weeks — work that took months on the previous generation of chips. 

But that’s not what makes this factory so unusual. The unusual part is who — or what — is making these AI servers. 

Alongside a small team of human workers, humanoid robots — some on legs, others on wheels — will do the assembly work. And they’ll run on an AI “brain” built by Nvidia and trained by Foxconn for the specific work of this factory. 

And Nvidia’s AI brain learns as it goes… 

Each server rack the robots put together teaches them something new. They learn faster sequences of motions. They get sharper at spotting defects. They notice the small signs that a piece of equipment is about to break and flag it before it does.  

This factory gets smarter the longer it runs. And it never sleeps… 

And when Foxconn opens its next AI server factory, everything the Houston robots have learned can be copied into the new robots overnight via a software update. 

This is what advanced manufacturing looks like in 2026. And almost nobody else in America can do it. 

But that’s about to change. 

A Once-in-a-Generation Reshoring Push 

For decades, we outsourced our industrial base — semiconductor production, pharmaceuticals, appliances, rare-earth processing. We sent it all overseas, mostly to China, to chase lower costs. 

Then COVID hit… and those global supply chains broke down. Containers stacked up off the coast of Long Beach. Auto plants idled because they couldn’t get chips. Pharmacies ran short on basic medications. 

I don’t have to remind you of what that felt like — you lived through it. 

Fortunately, the lesson got through to Washington: Depending on China for the things we need most makes us less safe and less secure. 

President Trump has staked a large part of his second-term agenda on fixing that vulnerability. And the corporate side is following the money. 

  • Apple (AAPL) has committed $600 billion to building out its domestic manufacturing capacity over the next four years.  
  • Nvidia says it will spend $500 billion on its U.S. supply chain over the same stretch.  
  • And TSMC (TSM) — the world’s largest chipmaker — has put $165 billion into its Phoenix, Arizona, complex, the largest foreign direct investment in U.S. history. 

These are some of the biggest U.S. industrial commitments since World War II. And they all share a common thread. 

These Are the Factories of the Future 

These factories of the future are being built around robotics, machine vision, AI-driven quality control, and connected sensors that talk to each other in real time.  

That’s a massive shift, and one worth being honest about.  

We shipped millions of manufacturing jobs overseas starting in the 1960s. Only a fraction of those jobs are coming back. A reshored American plant might employ a few hundred people where the original employed thousands. The rest of the work will be done by machines. 

It’s a bitter pill to swallow for the towns that lost those jobs the first time around and suffered the consequences. But automation is the model that’s winning worldwide. And it’s the only model that makes sense in the U.S. from a cost perspective.  

As investors, our job is to see clearly where the money is flowing — not to wish the world worked differently. The companies that supply the picks and shovels for this buildout — the robots, sensors, automation software, and precision machine tools — will benefit from this buildout. 

And if you’re plugged into the full suite of TradeSmith software, you didn’t have to read a single news headline to know this is an investment theme worth paying attention to. 

How to Spot Tomorrow’s Winners Today 

You can find out at a glance using the Global Trend Tracker tool we rolled out for our Platinum members in January.  

It scans the market for investing themes that are outperforming. 

The tool tracks 78 different themes — everything from Artificial Intelligence and Semiconductors to Lithium, Data Centers, and Shipping — using ETFs as a stand-in for each theme. 

Then it sorts them by what matters —Short-Term and Long-Term Health, returns over the past month, 3 months, and 12 months, and whether a theme has just broken out to a new 20-day high. 

You can see which themes are heating up… which are cooling off… and which are building momentum. 

One of the ETFs the Tracker has been flagging lately is the ProShares S&P Kensho Smart Factories ETF (MAKX). 

I’d never heard of this ETF before. But it’s up 75% over the past 12 months, compared with a 29% gain for the S&P 500. And over the past month, it’s up 20% — almost twice what the S&P 500 typically makes in an entire year. 

Why the excitement? 

MAKX holds about 50 companies that supply the equipment and services needed to build and run smart factories. Major holdings include: 

  • 3D Systems (DDD) — industrial 3D printing 
  • Emerson Electric (EMR) — automation and process control 
  • Onsemi (ON) — power and sensing chips for industrial systems 
  • Ouster (OUST) — lidar sensors that give machines spatial awareness 
  • Cognex (CGNX) — machine-vision systems for the factory floor 

Instead of trying to pick the one company that wins the reshoring race, MAKX gives you exposure to dozens of companies that benefit no matter which fabs and factories get built. 

MAKX is in a Green Zone on both our Short-Term and Long-Term Health indicators — confirming its bullish trend. 

It’s also worth noting that the ETF’s Relative Strength Index (RSI) — a momentum gauge that runs from 0 to 100 — is close to 72. Above 70 is considered “overbought,” which means recent buying could be running a little hot. 

So don’t chase this ETF higher. Scale in over time and treat this as a long-term investment in our smart factory future. 

Buy a starter position now and add on pullbacks. That way, you get exposure to a this trend over time in a disciplined way. 

I’ll keep you posted as more of these global trends come up on our radar. In the meantime, you can also follow me on X at @KeithTradeSmith. I often post there on new trends our Tracker is following. 

All the best, 

Keith Kaplan 

CEO, TradeSmith 

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