

Hedge funds are making a killing in the ‘golden age’ of AI hardware
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.The hedge-fund herd was early to see opportunity in the stocks of chip makers and other artificial-intelligence hardware companies. Those bets just delivered stock-picking funds their best month in over two decades.Steve Cohen’s Point72, Whale Rock Capital Management and Seligman Investments are among the hedge-fund firms that posted strong returns in April thanks in part to rallies in semiconductor stocks and those of related equipment makers.That helped make April the best month for stock-picking funds since December 1999, according to an industry index compiled by research firm PivotalPath, with a gain of 6.5%.
For PivotalPath’s index of tech-focused funds, April’s 10.3% gain was the best month since its data series began 28 years ago.The rapid adoption of AI coding tools and AI agents brought with it a broad, ravenous appetite for computing resources, from central processing units made by Intel to memory chips made by Sandisk. Much of the $670 billion in capital spending that Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta Platforms and Amazon.com are planning this year will go toward data centers full of advanced chips.
Customer demand for AI that they and others are forecasting is driving up chip prices and leading them to agree to longer-term contracts with suppliers.As a result, many semiconductor stocks are notching triple-digit percentage gains this year, capped by Samsung Electronics’ entry into the club of companies with trillion-dollar market values last week.Recent monthly returns are better than what many fund managers report over the course of an entire year. The publicly traded stock portfolio of Alex Sacerdote’s Whale Rock was up about 39% in April, people familiar with the matter said.
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