Agentic AI And The Next Layer Of The Trade: Beyond Nvidia
Agentic AI And The Next Layer Of The Trade: Beyond Nvidia
Publish Date: 2026-06-20 00:31:00
Source Domain: www.forbes.com
A photo taken on January 2, 2025 shows the letters AI for Artificial Intelligence on a laptop screen (R) next to the logo of the Chat AI application on a smartphone screen in Frankfurt am Main, western Germany. (Photo by Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV / AFP) (Photo by KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP via Getty Images)
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Jensen Huang called it “the agentic AI inflection point” on NVIDIA’s most recent earnings call, and for once the hyperbole may be justifiable. The first chapter of the AI investment cycle — the infrastructure buildout of GPU clusters, data centers, and networking fabric that drove NVIDIA’s stock up several hundred percent and established the semiconductor complex as one of the decade’s defining trades — is not over. But a second chapter is clearly beginning, and the investment logic in that next chapter is meaningfully different from the one that made infrastructure the obvious place to be in 2023 and 2024.
Agentic AI refers to AI systems capable of autonomous multi-step task execution — systems that can plan, reason, take actions in software environments, and adapt to new information without requiring a human to direct each step. These are not chatbots. They are software agents that can browse the internet, execute code, interface with APIs, manage workflows, and complete complex tasks that previously required skilled human labor. Morgan Stanley’s Jeff McMillan, speaking at a 2026 internal research session, described the Silicon Valley landscape: “seemingly overnight, every firm has become an agentic one.” He was quick to add that much of this is aspirational — but the direction is clear, and the investment implications are beginning to show up in revenue numbers.
Why the Application Layer Is Now the Story
The infrastructure layer of the AI stack has been extraordinarily well-compensated. NVIDIA has captured approximately 90% of AI accelerator spend — roughly $180 billion annually at current run rates. Data center operators, power…
