Cathie Wood, who heads Ark Investment Management, said there are better bets to tap into the exponential growth in artificial intelligence than Nvidia Corp., the chipmaker that’s seen its shares surge more than 180% this year.
(Bloomberg) — Cathie Wood, who heads Ark Investment Management, said there are better bets to tap into the exponential growth in artificial intelligence than Nvidia Corp., the chipmaker that’s seen its shares surge more than 180% this year.
“We’re really focused on those companies that most people aren’t talking about right now,” Wood said at an investor conference in Munich. “Nvidia’s easy, but it’s also really expensive and very obvious.”
Wood’s flagship ARK Innovation ETF fund cut its holding in Nvidia in January and missed out on most of the rally that has given the chipmaker a $1 trillion valuation.
Nvidia’s chips help power AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Alphabet Inc.’s Bard, and the rapid growth of those services has boosted its sales. More broadly, Nvidia is bringing in a new era of accelerated computing that it says can generate as much as $1 trillion in tech spending.
Read More: Cathie Wood Defends Bailing on Nvidia, Citing Risk of Chip Cycle
But Wood highlighted two other software companies that are “less obviously plays”: UiPath Inc. and Twilio Inc. UiPath has “a fantastic management team,” she said, noting that the company, which automates management tasks and internal workflows, could become a platform that all companies can build on. “It’s not sexy, but it’s very profitable.”
As for Twilio, best known for facilitating business-to-consumer messaging, Wood said that the company is powering Uber Technologies Inc.’s messaging on the ride-hailing platform and for its food-delivery app. “Last year, they had 1 trillion messages between consumers and businesses,” Wood said. “So they’ve got all of that data and it’s accelerating, of course. And now they’re activating it with AI.”
Uber is working on an AI chatbot that will offer recommendations to food-delivery customers and help them more quickly place orders.
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