Property · Union Post UK
Published: November 13, 2026 at 6:00a.m. EST BNN Bloomberg is Canada’s definitive source for business news dedicated exclusively to helping Canadians invest and build their businesses. In 1998, economist Paul Krugman famously predicted the internet’s impact on the economy would be no greater than the fax machine’s.
Jim Thorne thinks today’s AI skeptics are making the same mistake. This week on Ticker Take , we spoke with Thorne, chief market strategist at Wellington-Altus. He called the rise of the internet early, and he says today we are nowhere near the end of the AI cycle.
“We’re at the MS-DOS phase of AI,” he told us. Companies have barely started putting it to work, and the productivity gains are only beginning to show up. Thorne expects the capex boom to run until 2031.
That is when a U.S. tax break expires that lets companies write off the full cost of new equipment, like data centres and chips, in the year they buy it. Until then, he says, there is every incentive to keep spending. His advice is to ignore the doomers.
His framework is simple. He focuses on the highest quality leaders. Thorne believes the phase where beaten-down tech names went up 10 or 15 times on an AI story is over.
Instead, he is looking for companies with a moat, open access to credit markets and real free cash flow. “Sometimes an apple is just an apple,” he told us. In other words, he suggests investors stop hunting for the next Nvidia and own the actual winners.
Thorne walked us through seven examples of leading AI companies he likes. As always, this is not financial advice. Nvidia (NVDA) Like many AI bulls, Thorne sees Nvidia as a core holding.
The shares have had a huge run, but he says the part people are missing is its software moat. He is skeptical that other AI players are in a position to dethrone Nvidia, which leaves him optimistic about the long term. “You own it and you don’t sell it,” he told us.
Micron (MU) Memory has been a bottleneck for AI, and Thorne sees Micron as a big beneficiary. The company has huge margins and monster growth, yet it trades at a steep discount to peers such as AMD. He compares the business to Apple, which traded cheaply for years until being re-rated by investors.
While the memory industry has a history of boom-and-bust cycles, Thorne believes that is no longer the case. He also sees a huge catalyst on the horizon: Micron will soon be able to begin buying back its own stock. Microsoft (MSFT) Thorne likes that Microsoft has a loyal enterprise customer base and a successful cloud business.
The company has been a leader in the AI rollout, and it can also pull other levers, such as trimming its headcount back to pre-COVID levels. On top of all that, he notes that credit markets love Microsoft, pointing to its recent 20-year bond sale at roughly six per cent. “You don’t have to overthink it,” he told us.
“Just own it.” CrowdStrike (CRWD) AI is forcing companies to get serious about security, Thorne says, and CrowdStrike is an obvious leader. In his view, if you are building a portfolio, you need cybersecurity exposure. “It’s that simple,” he told us.
Palantir (PLTR) Thorne says the next phase of AI is implementation into corporate America, and Palantir is the company helping businesses through that transition. He sees it as the leader for that phase. SpaceX (SPCX) With growing uncertainty about the data centre build-out on Earth, Thorne believes orbital compute, meaning servers in space, “is going to be massive.” While the specifics of that build-out remain vague, he believes SpaceX has the moat, given it has already built a proven business that can land rockets and reuse them.
At the same time, he warns investors that SpaceX is not a stock for quarterly performance. For those with a long-term time horizon, he thinks it could be a game changer. “This is the stock you want to own for the next decade,” he told us.
“This thing is going to be a monster.” Tesla (TSLA) Thorne’s view is that Tesla is not a car company. It is a business leading the charge on physical AI, meaning robots. He says Tesla has an enormous amount of data and stands out as a leading-edge, real-world application of AI.
He also would not be surprised if SpaceX eventually acquires Tesla, which he says would be a nice reward for Tesla shareholders. The Ticker Take Thorne’s take on the AI story is relatively straightforward. He thinks the way to play the boom is by narrowing in on a handful of obvious winners, similar to what played out in the 1990s.
Jon Erlichman is a BNN Bloomberg contributor and the host of Ticker Take on YouTube .
Source: BNN Bloomberg
