Hardware is one of the strongest moats left.
Intel is back, Cisco just broke $100 for the first time ever, Meter Networks raised a $170 million Series C, and Dell is up 131% in the past year. On one hand you could discount this as a temporary spike driven by the 'selling shovels during the gold rush' pitch, and that claim is likely true. On the other hand, hardware companies may actually be the best positioned category to resist volatility driven by AI uncertainty and obsolescence.
That is not to say they are bulletproof.
Especially because many hardware vendors have made an explicit push to enter the SaaS business, grow their ARR, and rebrand as platform or software companies in the past few years.
But despite this, hardware is proving to be one of the industries least affected by AI displacement and in many cases actually benefiting from it. The short-term gain comes from the increase in demand driven by infrastructure requirements to power AI. The long-term benefit, however, is simply the fact that physical goods cannot be built in Claude Code.
That is not to say the physical world won't be impacted. But for every Waymo driving down the road, humanoid learning a trade, or VR headset purchased, the demand for compute, storage, and networking gets stronger.
As a way to support this claim, just visit the AI Apocalypse Survival Scanner and type in any hardware company :)