CZ says he prefers AI “shovels” over AI itself as infrastructure race intensifies
Binance founder Zhao Changpeng (CZ) said he prefers investing in the underlying infrastructure powering artificial intelligence rather than AI applications themselves, framing the current boom as an “infrastructure-first” investment cycle.Binance founder Zhao Changpeng says he favors investing in AI infrastructure such as data centers and energy systems over AI applications.He highlights NVIDIAs dominance in AI chips but expects more customized compute solutions to emerge over time.His investment firm still allocates 70%–80% of capital to Web3, keeping crypto as the core focus. Speaking during a Binance online livestream, CZ described his preferred strategy as focusing on the “shovels” of AI — including data centers, power supply systems and large-scale computing infrastructure required to support model training and inference workloads. His comments reflect a growing investor narrative that the AI economy is not just about algorithms or software, but about energy, hardware and compute availability at industrial scale. AI infrastructure becomes the dominant investment layer CZ noted that while NVIDIA currently dominates the AI chip market, the long-term landscape may shift toward more specialized and customized compute solutions tailored to different AI workloads. This view aligns with a broader industry trend in which hyperscale data centers, energy infrastructure and semiconductor supply chains are becoming the primary bottlenecks