Portfolio manager Christine Phillpotts on investing opportunities in Chinese companies amid trade uncertainty
Christine Phillpotts of Ariel Investments joins CNBC's Mike Santoli from the 2025 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholder Meeting to discuss emerging market trends amid trade and economic uncertainties.
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Jim Cramer wants to call attention to stocks popular with younger investors
CNBC's Jim Cramer on Tuesday said he thinks it's necessary to review stocks that have captured the attention of the younger investors, but aren't always highlighted by Wall Street analysts. "I think relevance dictates that we cover the companies that are treated as irrelevant or even pariahs by the gray beards around here," he said. "It isn't true that no one cares. I fear everyone cares, except those of us on Wall Street. We have to do better about nuke, about quantum and crypto, because our younger viewers deserve better." Cramer suggested that younger investors favor any stock that has to do with cryptocurrency — but not just largely-hyped names like MicroStrategy, Coinbase and Circle Internet. Instead, he said, these investors are looking at stocks that don't receive as much coverage, like Hut 8, Riot Platforms, CleanSpark, Cipher Mining and Galaxy Digital. Cramer said he wonders why this cohort doesn't receive more recognition, as many of these companies see significant trading action. Nuclear stocks are met with similar excitement by the younger generation, he said, besides prominent companies like Vistra, Constellation Energy and GE Vernova. He named Oklo, Cameco, BWX Technologies, Centrus Energy, Talen Energy and NexGen, saying investors are encouraged because new energy-guzzling data centers need nuclear power. However, he said that these sought-after stocks aren't ones that he finds "investible" because there won't nuclear reactors for a number of years. Quantum computing outfits are extremely popular among newer investors, Cramer said, but he added that group as a whole is controversial. He pinpointed IONQ, D-Wave Quantum, Rigetti Computing, and Quantum Computing. While he said it takes a lot of research to understand these companies, it's worthwhile to put in the effort — even if developed quantum computing is years away. According to Cramer, there is opportunity for at least a few of these stocks. "You could decry it as the wild west. You could dismiss these companies as nothing but hype," Cramer said. "Or, how about this, you take a company that trades 50 million shares a day, and maybe you just try to shed some light on it." Click here to download Jim Cramer's Guide to Investing at no cost to help you build long-term wealth and invest The CNBC Investing Club holds shares of GE Vernova.
CNBC
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Zuckerberg makes his biggest AI bet as Meta nears $14 billion stake in Scale AI, hires founder Wang
Mark Zuckerberg is so frustrated with Meta's standing in artificial intelligence that he's willing to spend billions of dollars to convince Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang to join his company, people familiar with the matter told CNBC. Meta is finalizing a deal to invest $14 billion into Scale AI, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the terms are confidential. Bloomberg reported earlier this week that an investment could top $10 billion, and a story from The Information on Tuesday said Meta would pay close to $15 billion. As a founder of one of the most prominent AI startups, Wang has built a reputation as an ambitious leader who both understands AI's technical complexities and how to build a business that's not merely focused on research, according to two former Meta AI employees who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity. Zuckerberg will be counting on Wang to better execute Meta's AI ambitions following the lukewarm launch of the company's latest Llama AI models. By not directly acquiring Scale AI, Meta appears to be taking a similar strategy as companies like Google and Microsoft, which have brought in prominent leaders in AI from the startups and Inflection AI by taking large stakes in those companies rather than buying them outright. Meta is currently on trial against the Federal Trade Commission for antitrust claims, and the company doesn't want to further upset regulators by acquiring Scale AI, multiple people familiar with the matter said. As part of the deal, Meta will take a 49% stake in the data-labelling and annotation startup, The Information reported, while Wang will help lead a new AI research lab at the social networking company and will be joined by some of his colleagues. The New York Times was first to report about the new AI lab. Scale AI, founded in 2016, has made a splash in the era of generative AI by helping major tech companies like OpenAI, Google and Microsoft prepare data they use to train cutting-edge AI models. Meta is one of Scale AI's biggest customers, according to two people familiar with the matter. The startup, valued in a funding round about a year ago at $14 billion, is number 28 on CNBC's Disruptor 50 list. In mid-2024, the company signed one of the biggest recent commercial leases in San Francisco, gobbling up about 180,000 square feet of space in a downtown building that had been occupied by Airbnb. Scale AI has increasingly made in-roads into the defense industry, and in March announced a multimillion dollar deal with the Department of Defense. In November, it collaborated with Meta on Defense Llama, a custom version of Meta's open-source Llama foundation model designed specifically to "support American national security missions," the company said in a blog post. Meta and Scale AI declined to comment. Heading into 2025, AI was one of Meta's top priorities. But Zuckerberg has grown agitated that rivals like OpenAI appear to be ahead in both underlying AI models and consumer-facing apps, current and former Meta employees said. Zuckerberg has been deprioritizing its Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research unit, or FAIR, in favor of its more product-oriented GenAI team to help Meta make headway in AI and improve its Llama family of AI models, CNBC previously reported. Meta's release of its Llama 4 AI models in April was not well received by developers, further frustrating Zuckerberg, the people said. At the time, Meta only released two smaller versions of Llama 4 and said it would eventually release a bigger and more powerful "Behemoth" model. That model has yet to be made available due to Zuckerberg's concerns about its capabilities relative to competing models, the people said. In particular, there is concern about how Behemoth stacks up against the latest from companies like OpenAI and China's DeepSeek, whose models are preferred by the wider developer community. Following Llama 4's lackluster debut, Meta conducted a reorganization of its GenAI unit, splitting it into two. Connor Hayes, a longstanding Meta employee, was put in charge of AI Products, while AGI Foundations was given to Amir Frenkel, previously a vice president of engineering and product for Meta's Reality Labs hardware unit, and Ahmad Al-Dahle, the previous head of GenAI. Al-Dahle's new position as a co-leader was seen as a sign that Zuckerberg had lost confidence in him, the people said. Zuckerberg admires Wang and considers him capable of a major role at Meta as an AI leader, the people said. A dropout from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Wang has built a sizable business and is familiar with AI's technical intricacies. The people described Wang as a "wartime CEO" who is in line with Zuckerberg's position that the U.S. faces increasing competition from China, thus requiring help from the tech industry. Wang told CNBC in January that he believes there is an "AI war" between the U.S. and China, and that the U.S. will need more computing power in order to compete. "The United States is going to need a huge amount of computational capacity, a huge amount of infrastructure," Wang said at the time. "We need to unleash U.S. energy to enable this AI boom." It's an unusual move for Zuckerberg, who has traditionally put loyalists in high-ranking positions. But it shows the magnitude of the moment and Zuckerberg's belief that a prominent outsider like Wang may be better positioned than any current Meta employee to bolster the company's position in AI, the people said. Wang also brings a lot of outside knowledge of how competitors like OpenAI are building their consumer chatbots and AI models. Data labelling and training has become more complicated in recent years as the capabilities of AI models has increased, said Vahan Petrosyan, the CEO of SuperAnnotate, one of Scale AI's competitors. "I would say Scale have covered probably 70% of all the models that are built," Petrosyan said. With Wang and others from Scale AI, Meta could gain "collective intelligence on how to build a better ChatGPT.""When Meta is buying them, they're buying their intelligence," Petrosyan said.
CNBC
an hour ago
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Casey's General Stores CEO on why consumers are focused on value
Casey's General Stores CEO Darren Rebelez told CNBC's Jim Cramer that he thinks consumers across the board have become more value-conscious over the last several years. "Coming out of Covid, when we had some supply chain challenges and inflation took off, I think that was a shock to the system," Rebelez said. "And then you compound that with interest rates going up, it really shook people loose. And so now, even if you have money, people are questioning why they're paying for something that they don't think the value is quite there." Casey's is an Iowa-based convenient store chain that operates primarily in the Midwest and the South. The company posted an earnings and revenue beat Monday night, and the stock surged during Tuesday's session to reach a new 52-week high, finishing the up 11.59%. In addition to fuel and groceries, the chain promotes a variety of pizzas and other food items. According to Rebelez, the pizza is made from scratch and has helped the brand earn a "cult following." He also said Casey's receives "strong ratings on value" from higher-income consumers. Rebelez discussed Casey's expansion plans, citing an acquisition made last fall that allowed the company to open new locations in Texas. Casey's could open thousands of new stores, he said. He added that in its home state of Iowa, which has a population of about $3 million, Casey's already has 550 million locations. "The population of Texas is 30 million people, and we have 170 stores there," Rebelez said. "We have white space for days in, in Texas." Click here to download Jim Cramer's Guide to Investing at no cost to help you build long-term wealth and invest
