Cathie Wood defended her company’s decision bail on Nvidia Before the chipmaker’s shares rose 160%, he says that the proliferation of computer systems is a risk.
Wood’s flagship ARK Innovation ETF (ticker ARKK) shorted Nvidia in January and missed several rallies that have added more than half a trillion in value to the market. Nvidia jumped 24% on Thursday alone after forecasting $11 billion in sales this quarter, 53% more more than experts expected.
“As far as Nvidia goes, there are a number of reasons we’re holding back,” Wood said in an interview with Bloomberg TV. He said when he hears, “the lack, lack, lack of GPUs or anything, I start thinking about the movement of the group.”
Nvidia is also facing increased competition in the battle to make chips to power the computers behind smart software, Wood said, citing companies like. Tesla Inc., Meta Platforms Inc., and Letters Inc. who are making their own chips.
Although Wood’s development fund has left Nvidia, some of the company’s “special positions”, including the ARK Next Generation Internet ETF (ARKW) and the ARK Fintech Innovation ETF (ARKF), still have exposure to the company.
“We haven’t given much back,” he said of the decision to leave Nvidia, which he called a “box saver.”
ARKK is up 25% so far this year, outpacing the S&P 500’s 9.4% gain. The Nasdaq The 100 Index which consists of megacap tech companies that contributed to the market’s profits in 2023 is more than 30%.
Nvidia has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI boom, seeing its sales rise on demand for its chips. Marvell Technologies Inc. it gained 29% on Friday after it said its revenue from AI products could double in the fiscal year. ARKK has nothing.
“We’re just looking at some plays that a lot of people haven’t noticed,” Wood said. “Like they didn’t understand that Nvidia was an AI player, until recently.”
Wood said Meta’s approach to focusing on AI was good, even though the company doesn’t appear in the company’s history.
Meta’s LLaMA AI language model is “capable of rendering better models” using less computing power and more data, he said.
“Meta is exciting for us,” he said, adding that he likes “the fact that Mark Zuckerberg is now prioritizing artificial intelligence instead of the metaverse, which was his focus last year.”