Chips on the side - Ed’s letter

Unless you are living an entirely tech-free life in the Catskills and are having this column read out to you as part of a service we’d be happy to provide for a fee, you are will have noted that everything featuring chips that’s not a burger has cost more recently.

And if you’re looking for funding, either as part of a refinancing or for something fun and new, you will have noticed that, for a while now, cash has been sucked in the direction of tech as investors are eager to involve themselves in what they hope is the next great boom.

Or at least they were, until they weren’t. Trillion-dollar IPOs don’t sit well with people protesting data centres or people saying they just don’t want to use AI for everything in their lives. And certainly not as AI becomes more expensive as those planning trillion-dollar IPOs try to recoup their R&D investment.

Investors have started to look at their all-AI portfolios and think about where they could go if maybe, just maybe, the robots don’t take over the world, or even if they do. And what we have noticed so far this conference season is that hospitality is becoming the financier in your life’s comfort blanket.

This is particularly true of high net worth individuals or family offices, who aren’t lashed to promises of certain returns by certain times, whose eyes aren’t glittery with the claims of tech CEOs. There is a growing opinion that hospitality is a safe haven for investment, because its real-world existence can’t be replaced by AI and, even if the robots do liberate us from work, we’ll have more time to spend in hospitality. Even if that’s drowning our sorrows.

It’s been a while since investors have run towards our sector with enthusiasm, seeking shelter. It’s a good job we have plenty of room to protect them.