James Kirby

Okay.

I really want to talk to you about AI.

Take a short break.

We'll be back in a moment.

Hello, welcome back to the Australian's Money Puzzle podcast.

James Kirby here with Eric Johnson from The Australian.

He's our business columnist on The Australian, former business editor as well, and he's been on the show, of course, regularly over the years.

Now, Eric, AI in the US, it was until this Iran crisis broke out, it really was the overarching theme and drove the US share prices, those very strong share prices that they've had and we haven't had, sort of underpinned that rally.

We, up until now, haven't had much of an AI sector.

We have some proxies, and more than proxies, we have an XDC.

But the AI, we haven't really had that yet.

Is there any evidence, like looking at the US market, for instance, the big players, NVIDIA, obviously the biggest player in the world in AI.

We've had NextDC, and I've talked about NextDC on the show when I was a

quite a big fan of Next DC for a long time.

I'm not a big fan anymore, for what it's worth, in that they did very well in the period that they went from about $6, $7 to $14, and they seem to be sitting there for a long time.

And I wonder, I'm wondering openly, Eric, as to what you think of Next DC.

It seems to me, if they are our sort of mascot in AI, they're a pretty weak one these days.

They're even spending big money here, aren't they, on their own account?

On one US multinational.

Actually, in a way, I mean, you've got to say it's good news because these big multinationalists, they never spent much in Australia.