When we write the story of the current revolution in technology and the global economy, it’s not going to be a story of technological prowess.
The US has a clear lead there, but China is catching up.
The end of the story will turn on something else entirely. If you strip away the academic jargon and the flashy tech headlines, the truth is that every major step forward in human prosperity has been powered by one thing: Energy.
Not ideas. Not politics. Not technology. Energy.
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Every industrial revolution is really an energy revolution wearing a different suit. You change the fuel and you change the world. It has been that way from the beginning.
The First Industrial Revolution began when humanity finally moved beyond the limits of muscle and wind power. Waterwheels helped, but coal lit the fuse. Coal was dense, cheap, and everywhere, turning steam engines into motion and power on a scale the world had never seen. Factories came alive. Railroads connected continents. Ships crossed oceans in record time. Cities grew because coal gave industry the horsepower to demand labor and capital. Coal did not just heat homes. It rearranged the global economy.
The Second Industrial Revolution turned the lights on. Electricity gave industry a level of control and consistency that steam could never match. Suddenly, you could run machines all day and all night. Oil arrived as the perfect partner. It flowed easily, stored easily, and packed more energy into a barrel than humanity had ever handled.
Oil created cars, trucks, planes, and the modern logistics system that forms the backbone of global commerce. Plastics, chemicals, and materials science took off. The combination of electricity and oil created an economy that could scale without hitting the physical limits of steam and wood.
The Third Industrial Revolution brought electronics and automation into the picture. Computers began to coordinate production, logistics, communications, and utilities. Nuclear power came online and provided baseload electricity that did not depend on weather or fuel shipments. Natural gas pipelines spread across the country and began feeding a more responsive, more reliable grid. Energy was no longer just physical. It became informational.
Machines talked to machines and processes became smarter. Oil still ran transportation, but nuclear and gas powered the digital backbone.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution gave us the Internet. Data became the most valuable commodity on earth, and cloud computing began pulling electricity into giant data centers rather than scattered server rooms.
For a brief moment, the world believed that energy demand would flatten as everything became more efficient. That fantasy faded quickly once data centers grew into industrial-scale power users. Natural gas was the only fuel capable of balancing the grid fast enough to keep up. Renewables expanded, but needed backup capacity and new transmission.
The entire economy became dependent on a grid that had not been built for continuous digital load.
This brings us to the Fifth Industrial Revolution, which will be all about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and ultra-fast, efficient computing.
This cycle of technological revolution will need more power than we are producing.
The nation that has the most energy will win the race for AI.
The country that wins the AI race will have a tremendous edge in the race to develop quantum computing.
The country that has AI and quantum computing will win the race in defense, energy, healthcare, and anything else you would care to think.
Here, China is winning.
Europe is probably too far gone to catch up, as it has let politics and feelings dominate its energy policies.
The United States’ energy policy has been wrapped in the coils of multiple regulatory agencies. This grid structure evolved along the path of the least resistance, apparently without adult supervision involved and the gentle misguidance of corporate overlords.
Our energy policy has been guided by the gentle winds developed from political pontification and oratory promises of little value and guided by opinion polls.
Although there is some doubt that Winston Churchill said, "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else," whoever did say it was right on the money.
We are now close to the point where we have tried everything else and are waking up to the fact that we need to emulate China’s burn everything approach to retake the energy lead we’ve had for decades.
The companies that deliver the energy needed to win the next industrial revolution will make investors an enormous amount of money,
Some will be natural gas production companies.
Some will be nuclear energy companies – and probably not the ones that get all the headlines that have great stories and no revenues.
Some will own coal mines.
LNG will be a huge winner in the next phase of global growth and energy demand.
One of the big winners will be the midstream assets. These are the pipeline, storage facilities, trucking and shipping terminals, tanker fleets, and other companies that move oil and gas from the ground to the light bulb or data center.
InfraCap MLP ETF (NYSE:AMZA) is a perfect way to take advantage of the demand for oil and gas infrastructure going forward.
It fits naturally into a Fifth Industrial Revolution portfolio because reliable energy infrastructure is becoming a critical enabling technology for a world increasingly defined by AI computing, high-density data centers, robotics, electrification, and advanced manufacturing. These innovations require massive and uninterrupted energy flows, and the midstream sector underpins that demand by moving natural gas, natural gas liquids, and crude oil to power plants and processing hubs that keep the system running.
As the U.S. builds out new generation capacity and expands LNG export capability, MLPs stand to benefit from higher volumes, new infrastructure buildouts, and long-term contracted cash flows aligned with the growth of energy-intensive industries. AMZA provides broad, income-rich exposure to these secular tailwinds while avoiding the volatility of pure commodity plays.
In addition to the upside from rising asset values, the fund is yielding 8.5% and generating high cash flow.
The Fifth Industrial Revolution is here, and it is as much an energy story as it is a technology story. There is a significant chance that powering the revolution will make as much, if not more, for investors as the leading tech companies in this phase of our economic evolution.
Editorial content from our expert contributors is intended to be information for the general public and not individualized investment advice. Editors/contributors are presenting their individual opinions and strategies, which are neither expressly nor impliedly approved or endorsed by Benzinga.
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