This Chip Stock Is a Metaverse "Pick and Shovel" Play

The metaverse is going to be big. I mean really big. Market estimates vary widely - and wildly.

Consider the range of numbers discussed in a November MarketWatch article...

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeny used the phrase "multitrillion-dollar" in reference to the metaverse's potential. Roblox Chief David Baszucki projects the metaverse will be a $200 billion market, while Bloomberg Intelligence puts the figure at closer to $800 billion.

If a fraction of that potential is realized, it'll be one of the most lucrative investing trends of the 21st century.

Of course, the metaverse is nowhere near being fully realized, but it's already handing well-positioned investors the kind of huge profits that come from owning companies providing the critical infrastructure used to make a virtual universe a reality.

Meta Platforms Inc. - the company formerly known as Facebook - has already invested more than $16 billion in building and operating 18 Facebook Cloud campuses in the United States. It expects to invest as much as $34 billion as it retools its data centers and networks for the demands of a fully global, fully realized, and functional metaverse.

The Facebook spend is big, that's for sure, but it's only part of a global demand explosion for data centers. And it is an "explosion" - by the time 2021 is out, global data center infrastructure spending will hit $200 billion.

That is an (almost) unbelievable profit "tailwind" for companies supporting and involved in these data center buildouts.