In the wake of escalating concerns over climate change and environmental sustainability, the world has witnessed a remarkable shift towards green technologies in recent decades. However, what stands out now is the emergence of what we can term as "Big Green Tech" - large-scale, ambitious initiatives and companies that are revolutionising the way we generate energy, design our cities, and protect our planet. This article delves deeper into this emerging trend, exploring the driving forces behind it, as well as its potential impact on global society and economy.

Big Green Tech refers to the rise of major corporations, startups, and investments in green technologies on a scale previously unheard of. These technologies aim to reduce ecological footprints , decrease dependence on fossil fuels, and promote sustainable development. They encompass a wide range of sectors including renewable energy, electric transportation, smart cities, circular economy, and environmental technology.

Amidst these opportunities and challenges, fostering collaboration between governments, businesses, and communities will be essential. Only through unified efforts can we overcome barriers and maximize the potential of Big Green Tech to drive lasting change. By working together to address infrastructure needs , enact effective policies, and navigate the transition away from fossil fuels, we can build a resilient and sustainable future for all.

As we navigate the landscape of Big Green Tech, it's essential to acknowledge both the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. The unprecedented growth of this sector presents immense opportunities for job creation, economic growth, and a more sustainable future. However, it also brings with it challenges such as the need for infrastructure upgrades, policy reforms, and overcoming entrenched interests in traditional energy sectors. Embracing the green revolution requires a concerted effort from all stakeholders - governments, businesses, communities, and individuals - to overcome these challenges and unlock the full potential of sustainable innovation.

The evolution of intelligence has been a pivotal aspect of human survival and progress since the dawn of our species. Early hunter-gatherers leveraged rudimentary information to outwit predators, find food, and navigate their environment. For millennia, the development of intelligence went at a glacial pace and was confined by the limitations of the human brain.

The development of written language marked a crucial turning point in the evolution of human intelligence. It allowed for the preservation and transmission of knowledge across generations, accelerating the pace of innovation and cultural evolution. This externalization of memory and information processing laid the groundwork for the information revolution we're experiencing today.

We are witnessing a revolutionary shift in the landscape of intelligence. At the current trendlines in compute of about 0.5 order of magnitude per year, automated AI research at a human level is likely to become a reality somewhere between 2026 and 2028. From then onwards, there is a good chance that intelligence will rapidly go superhuman, fundamentally altering the way we interact with and manipulate our world. Countless AGIs could then automate research leading to surprising breakthroughs in various fields.

As compute clusters become more capital-intensive, the entry barriers are becoming significant. In this new landscape, companies that generate exclusive data and have the capital to access large amounts of computing power are well-positioned to compete. As nations compete for supremacy, capabilities in fields such as AI, aerospace, defense, and robotics, have become essential. Companies such as SpaceX have become mission-critical infrastructure.

In this rapidly evolving paradigm, we aim to identify several modern enterprises that are mission-critical to their clients and are becoming more relevant to society. Our daily work is to gain intelligence and share insights with our partners. The investment portfolio is the manifestation of our never-ending learning process.

In this new paradigm, the nature of value creation is shifting. Intangible assets like data, algorithms, and network effects are becoming increasingly important. Companies that can harness these intangible assets effectively are likely to emerge as the new titans of the economy, reshaping entire industries and redefining the boundaries of what's possible.

Over the past twenty years, it was never easy to be a long-term owner of winning businesses such as Amazon, Nvidia, or Tesla because no spreadsheet would have given full comfort to own those stocks through multiple swings in sentiment. Investing requires a vision of the terminal value of a business. This vision is based on differentiated insights and it provides the conviction to buy and to keep owning great businesses.

Over the coming decade, we expect the most extraordinary techno-capital acceleration. Our job is to participate in the success of a handful of businesses that generate significant wealth in this interesting time in human history.

By continuously analyzing the terminal value of modern enterprises, we manifest long-term growth in our investment portfolio. Our investments are fundamentally a manifestation of lifelong learning. We are attracted to founders with skin in the game who are personally working on the most important problems. For example, Jensen Huang, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk.

A challenging mission helps to attract talented people. Many of the world’s greatest minds like to work at SpaceX. While technology is rapidly changing, the company’s culture is more stable. We put trust in the founding team to opportunistically keep adapting to an ever-changing world and thereby create wealth.

The ability of founders like Huang, Zuckerberg, and Musk to navigate technological shifts is evident in their companies' evolution. Nvidia, under Huang's leadership, transformed from a graphics chip maker to an AI powerhouse. Zuckerberg pivoted Meta from a social media company to a leader in AI. Musk's ventures continuously push boundaries in electric vehicles, space exploration, and neural technology. Their adaptability and foresight have not only created immense wealth but also shaped entire industries.

The impact of these visionary founders extends beyond financial metrics. They're reshaping societal norms, influencing global policies, and redefining human potential. For instance, Musk's work at SpaceX has reignited public interest in space exploration, while Zuckerberg's focus on the metaverse is changing how we perceive digital interactions. Huang's contributions to AI are accelerating breakthroughs across various fields, from healthcare to climate science. By investing in such founders, we're not just seeking financial returns; we're participating in the creation of humanity's future.

The Japanese word shokunin means ‘the endless pursuit of perfection for some greater good.’ In business, just like in any creative field, one can be guided by beauty. There’s an aesthetic to things that work exceptionally well. Participating in the creation of something beautiful is a source of happiness, which is why we enjoy investing.

Our mission is to participate in businesses that generate wealth in this decade’s extraordinary techno-capital acceleration - the race to AGI and superintelligence. Our portfolio businesses either develop essential infrastructure for this intelligence explosion or ecosystems that can leverage data and technology to become stronger in their fields. Prime examples are Tesla and Shopify.

AI has become a massive industrial process, and the entry barriers have become significant. Enterprises are scrambling to secure electric power and compute power.

While the explosion of intelligence is clear, the investor must be careful about the timing and sequence of investing. AI as a technology is inherently self-disruptive. Technologies of 2018 seem dated compared to large language models and in six years there is likely to be a difference underlying AI paradigm. As AI technologies are nascent and progress is fast the investor needs to be aware. First-movers in a new market are not always the ones that eventually dominate. For example, Google was the 12th search engine and Facebook the 10th social network.

We own shares in enterprises that are growing independent of capital markets and that are well-positioned to become more relevant in the future by leveraging their position and new technologies.

Our clients are private individuals, family offices, and institutions. Our goal is to be a valuable partner to them and to generate above-average investment returns.

Privium Fund Management B.V. (Privium) is the Alternative Investment Fund Manager of the Guardian Fund. Privium is responsible for the entire management of the fund in accordance with the provisions of the Fund Documents and applicable laws. The Aiconic team acts as portfolio manager of the Fund. The prospectus of the Fund and the key information document can be downloaded via the website of the Fund Manager (www.priviumfund.com).

In 2024, the Aiconic Partners Fund returned 79.29%, measured in euros and net of fees and expenses. By comparison, the S&P 500 Index returned 25.02% measured in USD. Since the fund’s inception in 2018, our compound annual growth rate (CAGR) has been 26.13% versus 15.29% for the S&P 500.

In October 2022, we made Spotify our largest position and we entered 2024 with 19% of our capital invested in Spotify, whose valuation was depressed as the market perceived it as a commoditized music streaming service. Over the course of the year, our investment thesis proved correct, with Spotify now operating at an annual free cash flow run rate of around USD 3 billion (up from about USD 150 million in 2022). The stock appreciated by 156% in 2024, and we believe that operational leverage will further drive significant earnings growth.

In April 2024, we increased our position in Tesla to a 16% weighting, seeing a clear path to a multi-trillion-dollar market cap. We see Tesla as a leading AI and robotics company with a vast addressable market and a strong corporate culture. The planned scale-up of Optimus—Tesla’s advanced humanoid robot—has the potential to become one of the world’s largest product markets. Meanwhile, we anticipate 2025 will be the “ChatGPT moment” for Full Self-Driving (FSD), signifying a major shift in public awareness of the dramatic strides in autonomous technology. Since making Tesla our second-largest investment, the stock has appreciated by 148%.

As our investments succeed, our portfolio concentration naturally increases because we let our winners run. We remain comfortable with this level of concentration in our highest-conviction positions.Over the past five years, during the pandemic and the 2022 sell-off, we kept our focus on each company’s fundamentals and long-term potential. The market will periodically test the investor’s temperament. For example, we acquired our shares in Palantir in 2020 when it was still a private business at USD 5.50 per share. After going public, its share price peaked at USD 39 in 2021, fell to USD 7 in 2022, and then closed at USD 75 on December 31, 2024.

Throughout this period, we focused on the business’s operational performance, recognizing Palantir as a consequential company well-positioned to leverage AI.

Another company leveraging AI is Databricks, a private business in which we first invested in 2021. In Q3 2024, Databricks reported 60% revenue growth on a USD 3 billion annual revenue run rate. The company has raised USD 10 billion at a USD 62 billion valuation, reflecting its success in providing an integrated platform that unifies data, analytics, and machine learning—enabling businesses to harness the power of AI at scale.

Aiconic is a crossover firm focused on investing in the leading public and later-stage private companies that harness technology to achieve massive scale. We aim to capitalize on the ongoing techno-capital acceleration, fueled by trillions of dollars flowing into AI infrastructure and autonomous robotics. We believe this major investment wave is still in its early stages and remains largely uncorrelated with broader economic trends.

Terminal value acts as our north star, enabling us to maintain conviction and equanimity to hold on amid fluctuating market sentiment.

Key to our strategy, in addition to selecting the right businesses, is retaining ownership at full valuation, through wild sentiment swings, and while the market value grows by multiples. For example, we acquired Nvidia in 2022 and it requires a vision of terminal value to not sell. We believed that demand for compute would be quasi-infinite and that Nvidia had a unique moat. Demand for Nvidia’s supercomputers looks set to be maxed out again in 2025 as autonomous agents and machines expand into a multi-trillion-dollar market. As the effective cost of AI computing decreases, massive new demand is created - much like the effect of declining cost per kilogram to orbit on SpaceX’s Starship.

We only invest in companies that genuinely inspire us, and each one makes us proud to be shareholders, creating significant value for both society and investors. One of our investment criteria is that we must love the business. This mindset differs from the usual call for total objectivity. As humans in an era of AI, our imagination of how things may become as well as our emotional intelligence—such as our ability to recognize beauty—can still offer a competitive advantage over trading algorithms.

Watching SpaceX launches sparks a profound sense of human progress. The engineering expertise at SpaceX is revolutionizing space travel, communication, and defense. We believe it ranks among the world’s greatest innovators and foresee a clear path for a tenfold increase in value by 2034, capturing a large share of the rapidly growing extraterrestrial economy. In 2023, we launched our first SpaceX special-purpose vehicle (SPV), and its valuation has already doubled. We continue to provide our fund investors with co-investment opportunities in SpaceX at each bi-annual tender.

Society is perpetually evolving, and the coming years and decades promise unprecedented change. As business models shift, we look for founder-CEOs who adapt swiftly and leverage the latest technology. They are the true capital allocators. Our priority is identifying companies with decisive competitive advantages that AI agents cannot replicate. We believe software creation has become commoditized, so we focus on businesses combining top-tier expertise of physical assets with software—such as Amazon, ASML, Nvidia, SpaceX, and Tesla.

Earlier in 2025, we acquired shares in AMD when it appeared undervalued despite being a distant number two in GPUs, clearly not riding Nvidia’s wave. In September, AMD effectively bet the farm by deepening its partnership with OpenAI — expanding both hardware and software collaboration and granting OpenAI a 10% equity stake. This positions AMD as the secondary compute supplier as OpenAI diversifies its infrastructure beyond Nvidia, planning to deploy roughly six gigawatts of AMD GPUs over time. OpenAI will help refine AMD’s chip designs to capture a broader share of AI workloads.

If observers speculate about an AI bubble, the reframed question becomes:
what percentage of tokens are gross-margin negative? We believe true demand will be vast, driven by applications not yet built. Scaling OpenAI’s
Sora alone consumes enormous compute power, and the coming wave of
autonomous agents and machines will multiply AI inference requirements by
an order of magnitude. We are in a capital-intensive land-grab phase for the
two scarce resources of this era: compute and energy. Compute allocation is constrained by Nvidia’s production capacity and, indirectly, by TSMC. Power, meanwhile, is constrained by urban grid limitations — not total generation, but transmission. Several Bitcoin miners, having secured large-scale energy access years ago, now possess a strategic advantage: they can repurpose this power base to build scalable AI infrastructure.

With nearly 3 gigawatts of secured power (roughly three times that of San
Francisco), IREN holds a meaningful power advantage. The company is replacing its Bitcoin mining rigs with Nvidia GPUs and is likely to become a
significant player in AI infrastructure. Nvidia itself has an incentive to
diversify its client base beyond the three hyperscalers, effectively extending
credit to emerging operators. As a result, we are witnessing the rise of companies such as IREN, Nebius (effectively Microsoft’s AI compute arm), and CoreWeave (effectively Nvidia’s).

Power constraints also explain why AWS appears to have lost market share.
More than one gigawatt of new data-center capacity — primarily for
Anthropic — is coming online, positioning AWS for renewed acceleration. AI
adoption is forcing enterprises off on-prem infrastructure, as few have the
energy capacity required to support it.

So far in 2025, we have strengthened our portfolio to benefit from the
ongoing investment cycle in AI infrastructure. We continue to explore ways to expand our exposure by owning both compute and energy assets — the
foundational inputs to the intelligence economy.

Over the past few years, we have invested in standout companies such as Palantir, Databricks, and SpaceX. While our primary focus remains on publicly listed companies, we occasionally identify exceptional private enterprises that we believe present superior return potential compared to traditional market investments. For instance, we view SpaceX as a potential multi-bagger investment at its current valuation, given its pivotal role as essential infrastructure in a rapidly expanding market.

Our mission is to participate in businesses that generate wealth in this decade’s extraordinary techno-capital acceleration - the race to AGI and superintelligence. Our portfolio businesses either develop essential infrastructure for this intelligence explosion or ecosystems that can leverage data and technology to become stronger in their fields. Prime examples are Tesla and Shopify.

AI has become a massive industrial process, and the entry barriers have become significant. Enterprises are scrambling to secure electric power and compute power.

While the explosion of intelligence is clear, the investor must be careful about the timing and sequence of investing. AI as a technology is inherently self-disruptive. Technologies of 2018 seem dated compared to large language models and in six years it is likely to be a difference underlying AI paradigm. As AI technologies are nascent and progress is fast the investor needs to be aware. First-movers in a new market are not always the ones that eventually dominate. For example, Google was the 12th search engine and Facebook the 10th social network.

We own shares in enterprises that are growing independent of capital markets and that are well-positioned to become more relevant in the future by leveraging their position and new technologies.

Our clients are private individuals, family offices, and institutions. Our goal is to be a valuable partner to them and to generate above-average investment returns.

Privium Fund Management B.V. (Privium) is the Alternative Investment Fund Manager of the Aiconic Partners Fund. Privium is responsible for the entire management of the fund in accordance with the provisions of the Fund Documents and applicable laws. The Aiconic team acts as portfolio manager of the Fund. The prospectus of the Fund and the key information document can be downloaded via the website of the Fund Manager (www.priviumfund.com).

Terminal value is known to be the value of a business beyond the period where future cash flows can be estimated. This value represents a large portion of the total assessed value.

Our investing effort is focused on envisioning the terminal value of a business, which entails its ultimate worth. No spreadsheet can accurately quantify the terminal value of a thriving company. This value is distant, dynamic, directional, and inherently an unknowable truth. The terminal value represents a vision of the direction in which the business is heading.

The vision is based on differentiated insights about the factors driving earnings growth, including industry trends and leadership. These insights provide us with the courage and conviction to initiate and size our investments, the patience and equanimity to hold, and the decision to sell if our hypothesis fails or if a more favorable relative opportunity presents itself. In the past, our vision of where the business was heading enabled us to hold on to companies like Shopify, Spotify, and Tesla, through wild swings in market sentiment.

The vision of terminal value liberates investors from factors that have little relevance to the value creation of an individual business, such as macroeconomic variables or stock price volatility.

All our investment decisions are influenced by understanding the terminal value of the enterprises in our investment portfolio. We are invested in this continuous learning process.