Cathie Wood has spent years backing challengers to dominant technology companies, but her latest semiconductor move leaned firmly towards the market leader.
ARK Invest sold about $72.8 million of AMD shares in its August 28 trades while buying roughly $53 million of Nvidia stock.
AMD disposal was valued at about $74.5 million and the Nvidia purchase at $55.6 million.
The move came days after Nvidia delivered another blockbuster quarter. But ARK has not said the trade reflects a loss of confidence in AMD.
The more defensible reading is that Wood was rotating towards clearer near-term AI earnings visibility.
Nvidia offers something AMD still cannot: extraordinary visibility
Nvidia had just reported fiscal second-quarter revenue of $96.2 billion, up 106% from a year earlier, while Data Center revenue jumped 117% to $89 billion. The company guided for roughly $108 billion of revenue next quarter.
Nvidia is no longer asking investors to wait several product cycles for its AI thesis to show up in financial results.
Demand is already translating into enormous revenue, and management says supply remains a constraint.
TD Cowen analyst Joshua Buchalter described Nvidia shares as “materially undervalued” after the results, according to MarketWatch. He argued that without supply constraints, customer demand could point to revenue nearly doubling.
Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya made a similar valuation case before earnings.
Arya saw Nvidia stock trading at a 34% to 50% discount to what its fundamentals could justify while maintaining a $350 target.
For ARK, that combination of dominant market position and visible earnings growth may have made Nvidia the more attractive destination for incremental chip exposure.
AMD is booming too, but Helios still has to prove itself
AMD’s own numbers hardly suggest a broken story.
Second-quarter revenue reached a record $11.5 billion, up 50% year on year, while Data Center revenue more than doubled.
Chief executive Lisa Su said Helios, AMD’s rack-scale AI platform, was beginning to ramp in the second half.
The difference is that investors are still waiting to see how quickly Helios can translate into a much larger AI revenue stream.
Futurum Group chief executive Daniel Newman captured that tension after AMD’s results.
Yahoo Finance reported that Newman viewed the quarter as good, but said investors had been looking for a much stronger guide driven by Helios.
Selling AMD does not mean Nvidia has won
Wall Street remains constructive on AMD.
Goldman Sachs upgraded the stock to Buy in May, arguing that AMD could be an outsized beneficiary of enterprise agentic AI adoption as demand supports both server CPUs and future data-centre GPU growth.
The firm also said it continued to prefer Nvidia and Broadcom on a relative basis.
That last point fits ARK’s August 28 activity especially well, as Wood did not simply sell AMD and buy Nvidia. ARK also added roughly $20 million of Broadcom stock.
That looks more like a reshaping of semiconductor exposure across several AI winners than a binary call that AMD has lost.
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