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Sometime around 1872, a Los Angeles newspaper published a line that reads, in retrospect, like an epitaph drafted before the funeral.

Describing Cerro Gordo, the booming silver mining camp perched in California’s Inyo Mountains, the paper called it “the silver cord that binds our present existence. Should it be unfortunately severed, we would inevitably collapse.”

Within a generation, the furnaces had gone cold, the water had run dry, and the prospectors had scattered. Cerro Gordo became exactly what its boosters feared: a ruin.

This is the oldest American story, stained in ore and timber and railroad grease. First, a new resource captures our attention. Then, a town erupts around it, frantic and hopeful, certain that this deposit, this junction, this mill is different from all the others, that it will hold. Finally, the deposit thins, or the junction gets bypassed, or worse… the town does not disappear so much as lose the thread of its own reason for existing.

A 2024 study published in Nature Cities found that close to half of all U.S. cities could experience population decline by 2100, representing between 12% and 23% of the populations across those cities and up to 44% of their geographic footprint.

The losses fall heaviest on the Northeast and Midwest.

Cities including Cleveland, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh are among those likely to depopulate, joined by others (Louisville, New Haven, Syracuse) that are not yet shrinking but are projected to start.

Even cities growing at their edges may be hollowing at the center, their land footprint spreading outward as the functional core (the density of schools, shops, hospitals, and cultural life that makes a city worth inhabiting) thins from within.

The silver cord frays long before anyone realizes it’s even been cut.

Watch our latest episode of Being Exponential With Luke Lango to learn exactly what that has to do with your portfolio:

The force most likely to determine whether those cities revitalize or collapse is the same one driving the biggest investment opportunities I’m watching right now: artificial intelligence. The double-edged nature of that force is exactly why I’m both bullish on the AI trade and clear-eyed about its costs.

AI accelerates the ghost-town trend. Remote work, already a structural shift before the pandemic cemented it, was the first wave. As AI makes it increasingly possible for a single person to do the work of five (across knowledge work, logistics, design, customer service), the economic gravity that holds people in dense urban cores weakens.

The Clevelands and Buffalos of the world, already fighting demographic headwinds, face a compounding threat. The rubber band between Wall Street and Main Street stretches further with every AI productivity gain that doesn’t translate into wage growth or community reinvestment. That’s the bear case for American cities. It’s real, and it’s already happening.

The investment opportunity is on the other side of that same coin.

Quantum computing, properly developed, could be the infrastructure layer that reverses this trend. The bottleneck preventing AI from genuinely solving problems at the community level — precision urban planning, grid optimization, water resource management, dynamic infrastructure triage for shrinking cities — is computational.

Current AI systems lack the processing depth for those kinds of complex, multi-variable problems. Quantum changes that. And it’s precisely why the two stories we cover on the latest episode of Being Exponential matter so much right now.

The problem most investors have with the SpaceX IPO is that they’re looking at the wrong scoreboard. They see the company heading toward a roughly $2 trillion valuation at more than 200 times trailing earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) and they shut the book.

Too rich, too speculative…

That instinct is understandable, and it’s precisely the kind of thinking that kept smart money on the sidelines of Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), Tesla Inc. (TSLA), and Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) at the inflection points that mattered most.

SpaceX reported $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025, a 33% compounded annual growth rate, with Starlink driving the largest share at $11.4 billion, or 61% of total revenue. The company has raised its IPO valuation target above $2 trillion, with the offering potentially arriving as early as June 2026.

The losses in the rocket and AI divisions are real. SpaceX posted a net loss of $4.9 billion in 2025, with Starlink’s profits effectively subsidizing everything else. But that is the price of building the Great Wall. You don’t penny-pinch when you’re constructing a moat that competitors won’t be able to penetrate for decades.

InvestorPlace · SpaceX (SPCX) · Pre-IPO

SpaceX financial snapshot — FY 2025

Revenue by segment, FY 2025

Starlink revenue growth, 2021–2025

Starlink subscribers (millions)

Sources: SpaceX S-1 filing · Morningstar · Sacra · Via Satellite · BitMEX · All figures FY 2025 unless noted

The valuation isn’t really the story. The story is the architecture. What Elon Musk has spent 25 years assembling as a collection of seemingly unrelated ventures is now converging under one roof.

X provides the data, the fuel…

SpaceX and its rockets provide the engine…

Grok provides the brain…

Tesla provides the body: the Optimus robots, the robotaxis, the physical layer.

Terrafab, the vertically integrated semiconductor manufacturing facility being built in Texas, is the forge where all of it gets made.

That is the full stack. If execution holds, it is the most powerful corporation in the history of American capitalism.

Critically, the orbital data centers SpaceX plans to launch beginning in 2028 represent an infrastructure layer capable of reaching the cities and communities that terrestrial networks are already beginning to abandon.

The picks-and-shovels plays we favor most are the Tema Space Innovators ETF (NASA), which holds a 10% stake in SpaceX through a special purpose vehicle alongside Rocket Lab USA Inc. (RKLB), Planet Labs PBC (PL), AST SpaceMobile Inc. (ASTS), Redwire Corp. (RDW), and BlackSky Technology Inc. (BKSY), and Photronics Inc. (PLAB), the only major photo mask supplier in the United States and a likely beneficiary of the Terrafab build-out. Nothing on Photronics is confirmed, but the breadcrumbs are there.

On the quantum side, the U.S. Commerce Department signed letters of intent to distribute roughly $2 billion in federal funds to nine companies, with the bulk going to International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) ($1 billion) and GlobalFoundries Inc. (GFS) ($375 million) to build domestic quantum chip foundries.

The government just told you something important. The bottleneck in quantum isn’t the underlying qubit science. It’s manufacturing the chips.

Just as NVDA dominated the AI Boom by being the chip printer, IBM and especially GFS — cheap, left on the side of the road during the AI sprint, now a quantum and AI play rolled into one — may be the biggest structural winners of the quantum era.

Our favorite pure-play names remain IonQ Inc. (IONQ), Rigetti Computing Inc. (RGTI), and D-Wave Quantum Inc. (QBTS).

The bigger picture is the one that should keep you honest and keep you engaged at the same time.

When space stocks and quantum stocks go parabolic, when the speculative layer starts outrunning fundamentals, that’s a sign we’re in the later innings.

Not the ninth. The sixth or seventh, maybe. The best returns are often still ahead, but the final bell is no longer theoretical.

The ghost towns of the 19th century failed because the resource they were built around was finite.

Silver runs out, and rail lines get bypassed.

What’s being built now — orbital compute, quantum processing infrastructure, a vertically integrated empire stretching from social data to semiconductor fabrication to physical robotics — is something categorically different.

The resource here doesn’t deplete. It compounds. Whether the cities left behind get to compound along with it is the question no S-1 will answer for you.

Catch the full breakdown on the latest episode of Being Exponential, where we go deeper on the SpaceX supply chain, our top quantum plays, and what the market’s late-inning signals mean for how you should be sizing positions right now. Also, be sure to subscribe to Being Exponential on X (formerly Twitter) for more exclusive content.