Cathie Wood's ARK Invest has long championed challengers to Big Tech, but its latest semiconductor trades signal a pivot toward the sector's dominant player. On August 28, ARK sold roughly $72.8 million of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) shares while purchasing about $53 million of Nvidia stock, according to trade disclosures. The AMD disposal was valued at approximately $74.5 million, and the Nvidia buy at $55.6 million.
The move came just days after Nvidia reported another blockbuster quarter, but ARK has not indicated any loss of faith in AMD. Instead, the rotation appears to reflect a preference for clearer near-term AI revenue visibility—something Nvidia currently offers in spades.
Nvidia's earnings visibility stands out
Nvidia's fiscal second-quarter revenue hit $96.2 billion, up 106% year over year, with data center revenue surging 117% to $89 billion. The company guided to roughly $108 billion in revenue for the next quarter. This means investors no longer have to wait multiple product cycles to see the AI thesis materialize in financial results; demand is already translating into massive revenue, and management notes supply remains a constraint.
Analysts have echoed this optimism. TD Cowen's Joshua Buchalter described Nvidia shares as “materially undervalued” after the results, according to MarketWatch, arguing that without supply constraints, customer demand could support nearly double the revenue. Bank of America's Vivek Arya, ahead of earnings, saw Nvidia trading at a 34% to 50% discount to its fundamental value while maintaining a $350 price target.
For ARK, the combination of Nvidia's dominant market position and visible earnings growth likely made it the more attractive destination for incremental chip exposure.
AMD's Helios ramp still unproven
AMD's own numbers are hardly weak. Second-quarter revenue reached a record $11.5 billion, up 50% year over year, with data center revenue more than doubling. CEO Lisa Su said Helios, AMD's rack-scale AI platform, began ramping in the second half. However, investors are still waiting to see how quickly Helios can translate into a much larger AI revenue stream.
Futurum Group CEO Daniel Newman captured that tension after AMD's results, telling Yahoo Finance the quarter was good but that investors had hoped for a stronger guide driven by Helios.
Not a binary bet
Selling AMD doesn't mean Nvidia has won the AI race. Wall Street remains constructive on AMD. Goldman Sachs upgraded the stock to Buy in May, arguing AMD could be an outsized beneficiary of enterprise agentic AI adoption, supporting both server CPUs and future data center GPU growth. However, Goldman also said it continues to prefer Nvidia and Broadcom on a relative basis.
That preference aligns with ARK's August 28 activity: Wood didn't simply swap AMD for Nvidia. ARK also added roughly $20 million of Broadcom stock. This looks more like a reshaping of semiconductor exposure across several AI winners than a binary call that AMD has lost.
For investors tracking ARK's moves, the shift underscores a broader theme: in AI infrastructure, near-term earnings visibility is becoming a key differentiator. While AMD's Helios could still deliver upside, Nvidia's current financial trajectory offers a clearer picture—one that ARK appears willing to pay up for.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.
