- Companies are tripping over themselves to use quantum computers
- CRISPR strikes a blow in the battle against cancer
- The mainstream press won’t tell you about this “backdoor” investment in AI
Dear Reader,
As we mentioned last week, one of the largest technology events of the year was held in Las Vegas…the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).
I didn’t attend this year, but one of my analysts, Nick Rokke, was there in full force, scouring the massive conference for anything new and interesting.
It was clear at the event that 5G wireless technology was one of the most important themes of the show.
The Consumer Technology Association (CTA) estimates that 12% of all mobile phones shipped in the U.S. market in 2020 will be 5G-enabled, and by 2022, that number will skyrocket to 63%.
Samsung also noted that it shipped 6.7 million 5G-enabled phones last year… which is not bad at all considering where the industry was in its infrastructure build-out.
But the show wasn’t just about 5G-enabled smartphones. The big theme was about how 5G will enable and improve products and services through other kinds of consumer electronics.
One of the most prominent applications is applying 5G technology to augmented reality glasses and other new services – this is something that we have written about a lot in The Bleeding Edge.
Another hot topic was using 5G technology in vehicles to enable autonomous driving… and the new media and entertainment services that consumers will enjoy in their driverless cars.
5G wireless technology is so revolutionary that it will allow completely new services to be delivered over this new infrastructure.
We can almost compare it to the internet itself, which enabled services that we use every day… like search engines, email, sending and receiving documents and photographs, and streaming video. 5G is essentially a wireless version of the kind of broadband infrastructure that we enjoy on our computers today.
This signals the rise of quantum computing in 2020…
IBM just announced that the number of organizations using its quantum computing services has jumped 150% in the last 12 months. This is a telling indicator for us as investors…
IBM’s quantum computing platform, the IBM Q Network, launched in late 2017. It had 40 clients as of January of last year. These were businesses, universities, and government research organizations paying to access IBM’s earliest stage quantum computing services via the cloud.
And today, the IBM Q Network has more than 100 clients. Some familiar names like Delta, JPMorgan Chase, and Daimler are utilizing IBM’s quantum computing services. Daimler, as an example, is using quantum computing technology to try to develop advanced electric batteries.
What’s interesting is that IBM is not really a name that usually pops up when we talk about quantum computing. Yes, it has been an active researcher in the space, but Google, Amazon, D-Wave, and Rigetti dominate the headlines.
Months ago, Google demonstrated quantum supremacy with its 53-qubit quantum computer.
Amazon launched a cloud-based quantum computing platform last year. Amazon’s offering features quantum computers from several different providers.
Plus, Microsoft, D-Wave, and Rigetti each have their own cloud-based initiatives and offerings.
These companies are each ahead of IBM when it comes to quantum computing. In fact, IBM has been a laggard in this space. And I don’t expect that to change.
But despite that, there is so much demand to explore what quantum computing can do that even the number of customers using the IBM Q Network grew by 150% in the last 12 months.
And that means we can expect an exciting year with regard to quantum computing in 2020. Stay tuned…
Yet another CRISPR breakthrough…
Shifting gears to another incredible technology…
We just saw another breakthrough in CRISPR genetic editing technology. It seems like new CRISPR applications are popping up every other week now.
As a reminder, CRISPR is like software programming for DNA. It allows us to “edit” the genetic mutations that cause many diseases.
The newest research comes from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Researchers conducted an in-depth study on the human body’s T cells. These are white blood cells that seek out and fight harmful foreign substances in the body.
In other words, T cells are a critical part of our immune response against disease.
When it comes to the fight against cancer, the problem is that T cells don’t normally live long enough to find and destroy solid tumors. They die before the job is done.
That’s where CRISPR comes in…
In their studies, St. Jude researchers found that using CRISPR to delete a gene called REGNASE-1 led to a much longer T cell life span. This, in turn, increased the power of T cells to fight cancerous solid tumors by 2,000 times.
That’s right… The study shows that CRISPR can make us 2,000 times better at fighting cancer. How amazing is that?
So this is an incredible advance in the fight against cancer. I’m on record saying that bleeding-edge technology like CRISPR will be one of the tools that finds a cure for cancer in the future… more specifically, this decade.
And for investors, I expect a new company to be spun out of St. Jude to advance this research. Or at the very least, we can expect an exciting company to partner with St. Jude or license its discovery. When that happens, my readers will be the first to know.
AI spending is exploding right now…
Here’s an incredible stat – companies are planning to spend nearly $50 billion on artificial intelligence (AI) this year. That’s up 31% over 2019.
As I have said before, AI hit an inflection point last year. Now we are seeing AI being implemented for very practical purposes.
The $50 billion going into AI this year will be used to improve customer service functions, automate the insurance claims process, help retailers predict demand for products, help businesses analyze and personalize purchases, and many other practical applications.
The point is, regular businesses, not just a small set of savvy high-tech companies, are implementing AI.
As the numbers show, AI spending is exploding right now. And here’s the big insight…
These projections only include spending on AI software. They do not include spending on the hardware that will be needed to run all these AI applications.
We can expect to see spending on AI semiconductors grow at an equal and likely greater pace. I don’t think this dynamic is well understood… And that’s a big investment opportunity.
Two of my favorite semiconductor companies for general-purpose AI are Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and NVIDIA (NVDA).
Readers of my large-cap research service, The Near Future Report, know these names well. We just sold AMD for a gain of nearly 300%. And we’re currently sitting on gains of 75% with NVDA.
That’s the power of investing in companies with bleeding-edge tech. Companies that are empowering and enabling the largest growth trends in technology always make the best investment opportunities. And returns are magnified when investors get in before the market understands their value.
While the mainstream media focuses on AI applications, investments in AI hardware are going to be incredible winners. My readers will be ready.
Regards,
Jeff Brown
Editor, The Bleeding Edge
P.S. There’s another investing trend I want to put on your radar in 2020…
For the past five years, I’ve been studying a small group of stocks that often go overlooked. Thanks to a mandate from a powerful government agency, these stocks have a “timer” attached to their share prices. And once this timer hits zero, these stocks can explode hundreds of percent in days or even hours.
I call them “timed stocks.”
That may sound too incredible to believe. But my readers recently locked in a 432% gain in 41 days by investing in just one “timed stock.”
What are these stocks? And why do they rocket higher so quickly? I’ll give you all the answers – and show you my system for pinpointing them – on January 22 at 8 p.m. ET. Go right here for all the details.
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