Investors Favor AI Hardware, Real Assets, EM Opportunities

CNBC studio guests in London and Singapore discussed four investment strategies as markets digested President Donald Trump's indefinite extension to the U.S.-Iran ceasefire and mixed regional market signals. J.P. Morgan Private Bank co-head of global investment strategy Grace Peters recommended diversifying beyond short-term headlines and leaning into long-duration themes with an 8-10-year runway, especially real assets and the AI infrastructure cycle.

Peters framed the opportunity as an infrastructure build-out for AI, which favors semis and hardware over software while the physical capex cycle is active. She called out sectors that typically benefit from that cycle: industrials, minerals, mining companies, energy-related infrastructure, and defense-related supply chains. Key practitioner takeaways:

• •Allocate to companies exposed to infrastructure- and energy-related hardware demand
• •Favor capital goods and materials providers that scale with long-term infrastructure projects
• •Treat real assets as portfolio hedges against heightened geopolitical risk
• •Consider tactical regional exposure to emerging markets where valuation or policy dynamics offer entry points

The conversation connects two persistent market forces: durable structural investment in digital infrastructure driven by AI, and heightened geopolitical risk that amplifies the role of physical assets. The recommendation to prefer hardware and semis reverses the long software-over-hardware consensus and aligns with the physical capex trends for hardware and energy-related infrastructure. For allocators, this means moving from exposure to AI as an abstract earnings multiple toward companies capturing the physical infrastructure spend.

Monitor capex announcements from cloud providers and major chipmakers, supply-chain indicators for advanced nodes, and policy shifts in energy and defense spending. Those signals will validate or blunt the hardware and real-asset trade.