“O for a Muse of fire to ascend the brightest heaven of invention.”
Written by Julian Wheeler – Partner and US Equity Specialist
Capital at risk. This article discusses individual US-listed shares, whose value can fall as well as rise and is affected by exchange rates. It is not a personal recommendation.
In the opening line of Henry V, the Chorus invokes the Muse for help to overcome the limitations of mere theatre, which cannot do justice to the epic scale of King Henry’s victory at Agincourt. In my role as narrator, I am calling on Meta’s Muse to help me justify all this vast investment that has been and continues to be made in AI Data Centres.
This ‘Agent’ is undeniably popular, with a take up and (more importantly) retention rate on a par with the original release of ChatGPT. The question marks, however, are not on Muse but on Meta itself: how on earth are they going to pay for all this? The answer was provided within a few days of the latest company results, with a whopping $100bn capital raise. That is a whole heap of dilution for shareholders, so the stock has dropped by 15% to reflect this. Sub optimal, you might say, but I remain a holder of Meta stock for what I see happening in its future. I would and have bought it at these lower prices.
However, this month, as promised, I will hazard a guess at some potential winners (Bold) and losers (Red) if this Muse really does inspire a new way to act in the next generation of digital communications.
First and most obvious place to look: follow the money. If Meta is really going to spend their anticipated budget of $140bn this year, then they need to get a wiggle on as there is still $54bn of that left just for this Q4! So, who is going to get that apart from the usual suspects of giant chip companies and other equipment that make up the ‘AI Capex trade’? Muse itself specifically requires a huge expansion in its network and storage architecture as this new compute power is put into the hands of consumers. Two beneficiaries of that should be Arista Networks (ANET) and Everpure (P); both companies count Meta as their most significant customer in those respective areas. While Meta may have fallen since their report, these two have moved higher.
Then there are a group of Tech companies who stand to reap the benefits of this huge increase in agent traffic apart from the obvious large Hyperscalers. They are the specialists in API communications: think of them as the waiter at your table who takes your order over to the kitchen and brings back your food. Twilio (TWLO),Cloudflare (NET) and possibly Akamai (AKAM).
While Meta’s spending is astronomic now, we may be at a peak of ‘inefficiency’. Zuckerberg pointed out that he expects the price of compute to come down since 90% of all queries on Muse can be handled by open-weight (that’s ‘Free’ in English) versions. You don’t need a Ferrari to do the daily shop; therefore I am not a fan of Anthropic and OpenAI. “Why pay 10x more” said the CEO of IBM the same evening. That’s a negative for (gasp) Nvidia.
Aside from the required and promised spending within the Tech industry, let’s consider what these early (2.5m daily active) users are invoking their Muse to accomplish. Where is it making a difference to people’s lives that might give some a boost and others a headache?
It turns out that shopping is the most common use, which rather counters the argument that no one would want to give any ‘AI agent’ the level of personal information required to make financial transactions. Puncturing the ‘trust’ issue further was the revelation from Zuckerberg that they had to reset the spending limits with Stripe, because more than a quarter of Muse users were making an average purchase of more than $200.
The winners should be those who have rushed to partner that initiative: Shopify (SHOP) whose small business customers can now be found more easily by an agent that has the time to find them, rather than a time constrained human who usually takes the easier route and went to Amazon (AMZN). Interesting that the leading e-commerce vendor has blocked Muse, while Walmart (WMT) has embraced it. I think this is because the latter is driven more by transactions and has less to lose from loss of advertising and revenue gained from promoting specific vendors. Talking of loss of advertising, Muse avoids search, bad for Google (GOOG).
When someone spends over $200, they aren’t buying groceries; it is usually holiday or travel related. The (almost too obvious?) losers are surely going to be the ‘middlemen’ of all types; Muse will have no truck with them. The aggregators such as Booking (BKNG), Tripadvisor (TRIP), Doordash (DASH) roll off the tongue, but you can think of many more for yourself. The jury is out on Expedia (decided to cosy up to Muse – inside the castle, looking out?), Airbnb and even Uber. How strong are these platforms when you have an agent to keep them honest? The benefits should accrue to the providers of actual service: such as Airlines, Hotels, and YOU in terms of lower prices.
The entire insurance industry has always thrived on consumer inertia. One of my bugbears is the insidious way an existing customer is always charged more than a new one: you should NEVER renew insurance of any type. You will ALWAYS get a better deal if you can get your lazy fingers to work a keyboard. But you just cannot face dealing with those, oh so tiresome, forms and waiting, forced to listen to mind numbing muzak while you ‘please hold while we never connect your call’ to customer service people who hardly exist.
Say goodbye to all that, your Muse is at hand to help. Here is a final anecdote from an American I saw last week, who was having trouble dealing with a global health insurance company over outstanding unpaid medical claims. Muse gathered up all the documents, doctor’s letters, receipts, made six calls to different people, reporting back on its progress when a decision was needed and bringing him into the call if authentication required. After a day’s work for Muse, two minutes of his time, the result was $5000 received.
For more background on our U.S. market views, visit the Over the Pond archive.
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About This Article:
This article was prepared by Julian Wheeler, US Equity Specialist and Partner, on 2 November 2026 at 11:00. It reflects the author’s personal views at that date, which may change without notice and may not reflect the views of Shard Capital Partners LLP or its other investment managers. Any reference to a company is an expression of opinion and should not be read as a recommendation to buy, sell or hold that security.
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