Jonathan Thomas
CEO, American Century Investments
“He talks about the AI is a cake and he says it has five layers to it... There's the base level, which is really the ground, the cooling, the electricity. You've got the chip level, right? The nvidias of the world, you got the infrastructure level, which are the data centers themselves. You have the model level, which are the LLMs. And then sitting on top of all of that is the app level, where the actual value is created from an investing point of view... those first two levels, the base level and the infrastructure level require base and chip require massive investment, tons of capital. As you go up that cake, it requires less and less capital.”
“when we talk about AI investing, you got to figure out which level of the cake you're in. Okay. Because it's not just the word is used so broadly and there's so much underneath it. What level of the cake are you in? And is that position that they currently hold sustainable, expandable and defensible.”
“for a while I'll call it, the creators. The creators and the enablers of AI were just soaring. And now what's starting to happen is the adopters are starting to receive the benefit from it. So that concentration of the creators at the Beginning drove the market like crazy. Now the adopters are getting the benefit. And I think ultimately the winners and losers will be determined by who adopt it and who's deploying it correctly.”
“If the adopters realize the expected benefit, productivity, because productivity is what drives margin, profits, gdp, the economy, everything. If they realize those productivity benefits that I think are out there, this, this will tick back up because people realize.”
“this comes back to the broadening out for the first time in I don't know how long. 50 some odd percent of the S&P is up over 10%. Right. It used to be a huge disparity, right. The, the S and P was doing great because of very concentrated. 40% of it of it was weighted in technology. And that broadening out is now happening. And you see it across small cap, you see it across emerging market. It's really, it's, it's live and it's real.”
“that was driven by the Internet. Right. Everybody thought the Internet's going to change everything and it's all going to be different. Another capex bubble, a huge capex bubble. And if you remember, the poster child back then for a bubble company was actually pets.com... And really the Internet took a long time to really crystallize its full effect. I'd go as far as to say it wasn't until the pandemic in 2020 where the effect of the Internet that was imagined in 2000 really was fully realized.”
“there's always a horse race and the leaders switch quite a bit. You know, the government's invest in investment in Intel. Fascinating. But I think Nvidia is going to be a player for a very, very long time. And when I see this and other charts like it, I think there's just a concern, a not yet to be realized concern that the spending that's going on there might end a little bit sooner than people had originally predicted.”
Jonathan Thomas
One-line summary: CEO of American Century Investments (~$350B AUM, privately held); source for Jensen Huang's 'AI cake' five-layer investing framework and the creators-to-adopters rotation thesis.
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Said
Speaker-attributed claims extracted from diarized sources. Each bullet mirrors one entry in quotes: frontmatter — keep them in sync.
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"He talks about the AI is a cake and he says it has five layers to it... There's the base level, which is really the ground, the cooling, the electricity. You've got the chip level, right? The nvidias of the world, you got the infrastructure level, which are the data centers themselves. You have the model level, which are the LLMs. And then sitting on top of all of that is the app level, where the actual value is created from an investing point of view... those first two levels, the base level and the infrastructure level require base and chip require massive investment, tons of capital. As you go up that cake, it requires less and less capital." — 2026-07-17-podcast-the-compound-and-friends-you-re-about-to-see-the-real-ai-winners-stand-up (2026-07-17)
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"when we talk about AI investing, you got to figure out which level of the cake you're in. Okay. Because it's not just the word is used so broadly and there's so much underneath it. What level of the cake are you in? And is that position that they currently hold sustainable, expandable and defensible." — 2026-07-17-podcast-the-compound-and-friends-you-re-about-to-see-the-real-ai-winners-stand-up (2026-07-17)
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On ai-creators-to-adopters-rotation:
"for a while I'll call it, the creators. The creators and the enablers of AI were just soaring. And now what's starting to happen is the adopters are starting to receive the benefit from it. So that concentration of the creators at the Beginning drove the market like crazy. Now the adopters are getting the benefit. And I think ultimately the winners and losers will be determined by who adopt it and who's deploying it correctly." — 2026-07-17-podcast-the-compound-and-friends-you-re-about-to-see-the-real-ai-winners-stand-up (2026-07-17)
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On ai-creators-to-adopters-rotation, ai-roi-reckoning:
"If the adopters realize the expected benefit, productivity, because productivity is what drives margin, profits, gdp, the economy, everything. If they realize those productivity benefits that I think are out there, this, this will tick back up because people realize." — 2026-07-17-podcast-the-compound-and-friends-you-re-about-to-see-the-real-ai-winners-stand-up (2026-07-17)
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On ai-creators-to-adopters-rotation:
"this comes back to the broadening out for the first time in I don't know how long. 50 some odd percent of the S&P is up over 10%. Right. It used to be a huge disparity, right. The, the S and P was doing great because of very concentrated. 40% of it of it was weighted in technology. And that broadening out is now happening. And you see it across small cap, you see it across emerging market. It's really, it's, it's live and it's real." — 2026-07-17-podcast-the-compound-and-friends-you-re-about-to-see-the-real-ai-winners-stand-up (2026-07-17)
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On steroid-era-earnings-inflation, ai-creators-to-adopters-rotation:
"that was driven by the Internet. Right. Everybody thought the Internet's going to change everything and it's all going to be different. Another capex bubble, a huge capex bubble. And if you remember, the poster child back then for a bubble company was actually pets.com... And really the Internet took a long time to really crystallize its full effect. I'd go as far as to say it wasn't until the pandemic in 2020 where the effect of the Internet that was imagined in 2000 really was fully realized." — 2026-07-17-podcast-the-compound-and-friends-you-re-about-to-see-the-real-ai-winners-stand-up (2026-07-17)
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On cuda-moat-erosion-to-nvda-rerate, steroid-era-earnings-inflation:
"there's always a horse race and the leaders switch quite a bit. You know, the government's invest in investment in Intel. Fascinating. But I think Nvidia is going to be a player for a very, very long time. And when I see this and other charts like it, I think there's just a concern, a not yet to be realized concern that the spending that's going on there might end a little bit sooner than people had originally predicted." — 2026-07-17-podcast-the-compound-and-friends-you-re-about-to-see-the-real-ai-winners-stand-up (2026-07-17)
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