For the last two years, the stock market has been obsessed with hardware. Investors poured trillions of dollars into the companies building the chips, data centers, and infrastructure required to train artificial intelligence. But as 2025 draws to a close, that easy money trade is maturing. The infrastructure is being built, and now the market is asking a new, critical question: Who is actually using this technology to make money?
This shift is known as the rotation to the Application Layer. It marks the moment when value transfers from the chipmakers to the software companies that solve real-world problems.
