Capital Is Flooding Into The Physical AI Revolution

AI is stepping out of the screen and into the physical world. Robotics VC deals hit record highs in early 2026: nearly $16B across 450+ deals.

Labor shortages, aging workforces and breakthroughs from NVIDIA, Tesla and specialized suppliers are accelerating automation in factories and warehouses worldwide.

Our free guide breaks down the 6 investable robotics subsectors driving the buildout, from AI compute and machine vision to humanoid robots. Enter your email and we’ll send it straight to your inbox.

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☕️ GM Munchers! The election results are in and they’re decisive. If only my wife could pick a restaurant with the same confidence America just picked a Congress.

On today’s menu:

• 🌊 The Blue Wave Sent Stocks Soaring

• 🏗️ America Just Voted Against Data Centers

• 🇺🇲 Trump Media Crashes Over 20%

• 🦉 Duolingo Stock Just Went On A Tear

• 🤯 Big News About The Upcoming Anthropic IPO

Yesterday’s numbers:

BREAKING NEWS

🌊 The Blue Wave Sent Stocks Soaring

The midterms delivered a stunner. Democrats pulled off a clean sweep, flipping both the House and the Senate in decisive fashion. And here’s the key part for your money: President Trump keeps the White House. That means we now have what’s called a “split government,” where one party runs the White House and the other controls Congress. Wall Street took one look at that setup and threw a party.

And what a party it was. The Dow Jones rocketed up about 1,600 points, roughly 3.2%, its best single day in 18 months. That was the biggest post-midterm rally since 1982. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq jumped too, and the market’s main fear gauge plunged nearly 20%. On top of all that, oil prices tumbled about 7%, on hopes the new Congress pushes toward ending the Iran war. Lower oil means less inflation pressure, which is exactly what this market wanted.

So why does split government get investors so excited? One word: gridlock. When Congress and the White House are controlled by opposing parties, it becomes very hard to pass big, sweeping changes to taxes or spending. That might sound frustrating, but markets love it, because it means stability and fewer nasty surprises. History backs this up in a big way. Stocks have historically performed tremendously after midterms, no matter who wins, and a split government with a Republican president has been one of the best setups of all.

• 🏛️ The margins were decisive. Democrats took roughly 241 House seats and 54 Senate seats, a resounding win, though they still lack the 60 Senate votes needed to override Trump’s veto.

• 🚗 The “Trump trade” cracked. Tesla, SpaceX-linked names, defense contractors, and Trump Media all fell on the results, while retailers, renewables, and health-care stocks rallied instead.

• 💵 Bonds and the dollar moved too. Treasury yields fell as investors bet a split Congress curbs heavy government borrowing, and the US dollar slipped on the news.

The Munch Take: We’ve been telling you for weeks now that the fear gripping this market was overblown, and yesterday we watched that thesis play out in real time. This is exactly what we meant. While everyone else was panicking about wars, AI spending, and politics, the smart move was to stay calm and keep your eyes on quality. We are super bullish here, plain and simple. The combination of a market-friendly split government, falling oil, fading war fears, and the strong historical track record after midterms is a genuinely powerful setup. One monster day does not erase every risk, and we’ll surely see bumps ahead. But the bigger picture is finally clearing up, and it looks bright. We didn’t sell into the fear, and days like yesterday are the reward for that patience. Stay the course, Munchers.

Pop Quiz: Name the $5 Company Sitting on Elon's Metal Supply (Ad)

Most people can't. The free report has the answer, and the ticker comes by text.

It's a small company. It's not a household name. The big financial networks don't cover it. It trades around $5.

Behind Elon Musk's rockets, satellites, batteries and robots sits a small set of metals America is short on. This company is sitting on that supply.

I give up, who is it?

STORY OF THE DAY

🏗️ America Just Voted Against Data Centers

While everyone watched the big election results, a quieter revolt was happening at the local level. On Tuesday, American voters overwhelmingly rejected data centers nearly everywhere they appeared on the ballot. According to CNBC and Ballotpedia, there were 41 local measures across 10 states, and voters sided against data centers in 40 of them. The only town that said yes was tiny Harwood, North Dakota. That is about as lopsided a result as you’ll ever see.

This matters way more than it might sound, so let’s break it down. Data centers are the giant warehouses full of computers that power the entire AI boom. Every chatbot, every AI tool, every bit of the technology Wall Street is obsessed with runs through these massive facilities. And building them requires enormous amounts of electricity and water, which is exactly why local residents are pushing back hard.

The heart of the fight was Ohio, which had 21 of the measures all by itself. Town after town passed outright bans or strict limits, including places like Defiance, Piqua, Sunbury, and Urbana. The margins were brutal for the industry. In Wilmington, Ohio, around 80% of voters rejected rezoning land for a data center across four separate votes.

• ⚡ Power bills are the trigger. Residents fear these facilities will strain the local electricity grid and drive up their own utility bills, making it a kitchen-table issue.

• 🗺️ The resistance is spreading. Beyond Ohio, towns in Maine passed six-month pauses and Kansas towns passed bans, showing this is a nationwide movement, not a regional one.

• 🏛️ Governors could pile on. Several newly elected Democratic governors have called for slowing data center buildouts, which ties straight into Tuesday’s blue wave.

The Munch Take: Here’s the big insight we’re taking away, and it’s a genuinely important shift. For a long time, the main thing holding back the AI boom was getting enough computer chips, especially Nvidia’s. That was the famous bottleneck everyone talked about. But Tuesday revealed a brand new roadblock that could matter just as much: whether a town will even let these things get built. Call it permitting risk. You can have all the chips in the world, but if local communities keep voting no, the AI buildout slows down anyway. This is a real curveball for the tech giants spending hundreds of billions on these facilities. The companies are already scrambling, even trying to rebrand data centers as friendlier-sounding “compute campuses” to win people over. We find this fascinating because it flips the whole AI story on its head. The smartest engineers and the deepest pockets can’t force a project through if the neighbors won’t have it. For investors watching the AI trade, this is a new variable worth taking seriously. The revolution might be unstoppable in the lab, but at the ballot box, it just hit a wall.

MARKET OVERVIEW

🍟 Tasty Movers & Shakers

⏰ From Oxford Club: Buy This $5 Stock Before Elon Musk Does

🇺🇸 $DJT Trump Media cratered 24.54% after Democrats swept Congress in the midterms, a direct hit to the company partly owned by President Trump.

📱 $APP AppLovin jumped 10.69% heading into its earnings report, as investors bet its AI-powered advertising engine keeps humming.

🚗 $UBER Uber rose 4.91% on better-than-expected earnings, powered by fast growth in its food delivery arm. The company that started with rides is quietly becoming a delivery giant too.

💉 $NVO Novo Nordisk climbed 4.95% after raising its full-year outlook on strong sales of its Wegovy weight loss pill. The GLP-1 gold rush keeps minting money for the drugmakers at the front of the pack.

🔻 $TSLA SpaceX slid 3.81% and Tesla fell 3.34% as the Democratic sweep stoked fears of tighter scrutiny on AI data centers. The so-called “Trump trade” unwound fast once the election math became clear.

📉 $DOX Amdocs plunged 30.07% as an escalating fight with T-Mobile clouded the software provider’s revenue outlook.

STOCK OF THE DAY

🦉 Duolingo Stock Just Went On A Tear

That little green owl is having a moment. Duolingo $DUOL, the language-learning app famous for guilt-tripping you into practicing, saw its stock rocket as much as 33% on Tuesday after a knockout earnings report. That’s a massive one-day move for any company. And while the stock is still down almost 7% for the year, meaning it’s negative in 2026, this is a genuine turnaround that has investors buzzing again.

So what lit the fire? It all comes down to users, and lots of them. Duolingo reported that its daily active users jumped 29% from a year ago to a whopping 64.9 million people. Even better, that growth is speeding up, marking the second quarter in a row that user numbers accelerated. Revenue beat expectations too, and the company raised its forecast for the rest of the year.

Here’s the deeper story that really got Wall Street excited. For a while, investors were nervous about one thing: sure, tons of people use the free app, but can Duolingo actually turn those free users into paying subscribers? This quarter started to answer that question with a clear yes. Subscription bookings, which track future paid revenue, picked up nicely. That’s the proof investors were waiting for.

• 💰 Paying customers are growing. Duolingo now has 13.1 million paid subscribers, up 14% from last year, showing the free-to-paid pipeline is working.

• 🎮 Games are hooking users. Partnerships with titles like Brawl Stars pulled in millions of users, since the rewards require coming back day after day, building a habit.

• 🎯 The big dream is huge. CEO Luis von Ahn set an ambitious goal of reaching one billion learners, hinting at how much room there still is to grow.

The Munch Take: Here’s our honest read, and full confession first: I haven’t brushed up on my German in about nine months, so my streak is long dead and the owl has officially given up on me. Clearly I’m the only one slacking off, though, because this stock is absolutely ripping. That’s the whole bull case in a nutshell. Duolingo has built something genuinely sticky, an app that millions of people open every single day out of habit, and it’s finally proving it can turn that massive engagement into real, growing revenue. That combination of a beloved brand, accelerating users, and improving monetization is exactly the recipe that gets a stock moving like this. One thing worth watching: paid subscribers are growing only about half as fast as the free users, so the company still needs to keep converting all that attention into dollars. But this was a genuinely strong quarter, and a beaten-down name roaring back to life always catches our eye. Maybe we’ll even restart that German streak. Probably not, but the stock doesn’t seem to need us anyway.

Every Chatbot Answer Pulls Power From the Grid (Ad)

Hundreds of millions of questions a day add up fast. One American energy company is already feeding that demand, and its name comes by text.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory put data centers at 4.4% of U.S. electricity in 2023. Its 2024 report projects up to 12% by 2028. That's close to a tripling in five years, on a grid that wasn't built for it.

Text me the energy company

🚀 Pre-Market Fuel

1. 🤯 Big news about the upcoming Anthropic IPO.

2. 🥇 This just became the most valuable company in the world.

3. 🇮🇱 Netanyahu officially loses majority in Israel’s election.

4. 🚀 Microsoft just hit a new all-time high.

🍪 Munchy Memes

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