The ECB now says gold has passed US Treasuries as the largest single asset in global central bank reserves, with the metal at 27% of holdings. That is a slow shift years in the making, but the line crossing in mid 2026 is still a marker worth pausing on. The same week, an activist fund went after Australia’s largest gold miner and a US startup said it would drill for lithium under two German and Polish battery factories.
Ohio paused new tax credit deals for data centers this week. Governor Mike DeWine halted fresh commitments while the state reviews how much taxpayer money flows into hyperscale builds. The signal is small but worth watching. AI compute demand keeps climbing, and political tolerance for subsidizing it is starting to wobble.
Nvidia delivered another beat and added $80 billion of buyback authorization. Bloom Energy locked in a power supply deal with cloud builder Nebius worth up to $2.6 billion. The cluster of AI infrastructure prints landed against a tape where the equity risk premium is now negative for the first time since the dot com era.
The AI capex story in 2026 is no longer just about Nvidia GPUs. It is about everything around them: high bandwidth memory from Micron, on site power from Bloom Energy fuel cells, compute capacity from Nebius, and robotics platforms tied back to the same chip stack through partnerships like Nvidia and Kawasaki. The interesting numbers are now in the second derivative, not the headline GPU shipments.
Three signals from the May 22 tape point in the same direction. Public money is rotating into quantum and chips. Large AI buyers are reshuffling vendors. Robots are getting paired with general purpose AI hardware. None of these threads are new on their own, but they all showed up in the same window.