Every AI star needs a setup man.
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Hello reader.
Babe Ruth is undoubtedly one of the most famous baseball players in American history.
He became legendary for his 714 career home runs, particularly with the New York Yankees, during his time in Major League Baseball in the 1910s through the 1930s.
Today, he is widely regarded as the greatest baseball player of all time.
Wall Street has a similar elite player: Nvidia company (NVDA)
Since 2023, Nvidia has achieved superstar status thanks to its massive profits, which, like Ruth, have often knocked it out of the park.
First-quarter results, released Wednesday, were another snapshot. Revenue rose 85% year over year to $81.6 billion. First-quarter profits jumped 140% year over year to $45.55 billion, or $1.87 per share.
Fueled by demand for AI, data center revenues rose 92% year-over-year to a record $75.2 billion.
CEO Jensen Huang emphasized that “agent AI” and AI factories are driving demand in the long term, with Nvidia targeting over $1 trillion in AI infrastructure opportunities through 2027.
But overall market reaction after Nvidia’s earnings announcement was weak.
This has become a common occurrence with Nvidia’s earnings: the company is experiencing explosive growth, but the stock price is already close to perfect beforehand. This means that an “excellent” report could trigger a flat or slightly lower reaction if investors were hoping for something greater.
Even Ruth was so dominant in relation to his environment that the environment itself became the constraint. (Because he was so much better than everyone else, archers constantly avoided him.)
But the bigger problem is that the talk about investing in AI in 2026 has become almost entirely about Babe Ruth.
While the megastar gets the attention, it’s the supporting companies that make the ecosystem work.
Franchise players alone will not win the AI boom. It also depends on quieter companies working to enable, distribute, and operate AI reliably throughout the economy.
per day Smart money, Let’s look beyond the hype and headlines of the “Babe Ruth” companies.
I will share with you the type of company each portfolio needs to create a winning portfolio…
Why does artificial intelligence need more than zombies?
Every Babe Ruth needs an Earl Combs.
If you don’t recognize the name, you’re not alone. Combs was the leadoff hitter and center fielder for the 1927 New York Yankees.
His teammates included legends like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Combs hit .356 that year, led the American League with 231 hits, 23 triples, and 137 runs scored, and was later inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
He was, by all objective measures, one of the best players of his era.
But no one remembers him.
They remember Ruth. Ruth was the reason opposing managers lost sleep. But here’s what these managers also know: The Yankees didn’t beat you with Ruth alone. They hit you because Combs was often on base when Ruth came to the plate.
It wasn’t his job to swing for the fences. His mission was to get to base, reliably, every day, and let the big guns behind him lead him home.
Likewise, a portfolio that relies solely on home run hitters is a fragile lineup. Not only did the 1927 Yankees have Ruth, they had Combs on base nearly 40% of the time, quietly and steadily manufacturing conditions that made Ruth’s power dangerous.
The next company is Earl Combs in the age of artificial intelligence. It quietly applies AI to real-world business problems in stable, repeatable ways
The quiet performers of the AI revolution
Like every other mining company on earth, Freeport-McMoRan Corporation (FCX) It constantly seeks to enhance and improve its production.
It integrates AI technologies into its production process, and the results are impressive.
Starting with a single old mine in Bagdad, Arizona, a small joint team of Freeport metallurgists and engineers worked alongside data scientists at McKinsey to build and train a machine learning model from scratch. Instead of running the plant in one place all day, Freeport can now adjust settings hourly to maximize production of a particular type of ore, quickly increasing production by 5% to 10%.
Freeport’s Chief Information and Innovation Officer created a common data infrastructure and architecture to support all processing, enabling rapid deployment of AI tools across minimally designed sites.
The company is adamant that scaling AI across its mines can drive system-wide production increases resulting in 200 million pounds of copper annually – representing $350 million to $500 million in annual operating profits.
The fact that one of the world’s largest copper producers extracts meaningful additional production from existing assets through artificial intelligence — without the time, capital, or environmental footprint of new construction — proves the hidden power of this technology.
And the hidden power of having Earl Combs on your team.
I recommend another quiet but consistent performer in my country Sell this, buy that Presentation. Unlike Freeport, it does not use artificial intelligence.
Instead, it can everyone to use it. Even Babe Ruths.
It built this position before most investors understood what it would take to actually build AI.
He is the ultimate “groomed man.” I reveal the name and symbol of this company here.
The bottom line is that these Earl Combs are not swinging for the fences. They apply established, proven aspects of AI — large language models (LLMs), machine learning, and predictive analytics — to problems they deeply understand, with human judgment in the loop.
They may not make headlines like Nvidia does, but they score points.
They are the players you definitely want on your team.
It is considered,
Eric Fry
