Latest news with #Tepper
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
This AI Giant Is Among the Top 5 Holdings of Billionaires David Tepper, Philippe Laffont, and Stephen Mandel Jr. -- and It's Not Nvidia
Billionaires are betting on the AI revolution, and this particular company already is winning in the field. This tech player also has built a solid earnings track record over time. 10 stocks we like better than Amazon › Investors, including billionaires, have generated enormous returns by investing in Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) in recent years. The artificial intelligence (AI) chip giant climbed more than 800% from the start of 2023 through the end of last year as demand for its products and services soared. And with the AI market forecast to reach beyond $2 trillion a few years down the road, it's likely Nvidia will continue to benefit. But it's important to remember that Nvidia isn't the only attractive AI bet to be found. In fact, right now, some of the world's top investors are favoring another AI giant over Nvidia. This particular player is among the top five holdings of billionaires David Tepper of Appaloosa Management, Philippe Laffont of Coatue Management, and Stephen Mandel Jr. of Lone Pine Capital. This company, like Nvidia, already has brought in billions of dollars in revenue thanks to AI -- and could win as the AI boom continues. Let's find out more. First, it's important to note that these three billionaires have significant positions in technology stocks, with other such players among their top 10 holdings. So they clearly believe in the AI revolution and are setting themselves up to potentially gain as AI becomes more and more a part of our daily lives and the operations at businesses of every size. For example, Tepper and Mandel each have three Magnificent Seven stocks among their 10 most heavily weighted holdings, and Laffont has four. So, which company has caught the eye of these technology-focused investors? None other than AI powerhouse Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN). As of the first quarter of the year, Amazon is the third biggest stock position in Tepper's $8.3 billion portfolio, the second-biggest in Laffont's $22 billion portfolio, and the third- largest in Mandel's $11 billion fund. Here are the details: Tepper holds 2,510,000 Amazon shares, and the stock represents 5.7% of the portfolio. Laffont holds 10,753,808 Amazon shares, and the stock represents 9.02% of his portfolio. Mandel holds 4,352,740 Amazon shares, and they represent 7.15% of his portfolio. This is according to the billionaires' 13Fs, filings that managers of $100 million or more must submit to the Securities and Exchange Commission on a quarterly basis. Now the question is: These billionaires clearly see Amazon as a fantastic AI investment, but is it right for you too? After all, though billionaires have demonstrated their investment expertise, some of their moves may not suit your investment strategy or comfort with risk. It's important to take these elements into consideration before diving in. You probably are most familiar with Amazon thanks to its e-commerce business. It's built an empire in the area, and one that extends around the globe. The operation helps the company generate billions of dollars in revenue year after year, and its extensive fulfillment network and popular subscription program Prime offer it a significant competitive advantage, or moat. But Amazon also is becoming a leader in AI, using the technology to streamline those e-commerce operations and even developing and selling AI products and services to customers through its Amazon Web Services (AWS) unit. In fact, due to Amazon's aggressive push into the AI space, AWS recently delivered a $117 billion annual revenue run rate. So Amazon already is generating significant growth from this hot technology. And since AWS is the world's leading cloud services provider, it's in the perfect spot to capture more and more business. As AWS customers develop AI projects, they have all that they need right at their fingertips on AWS -- from access to top chips like Nvidia's to a fully managed service that tailors popular large language models to a customer's needs. The AI buildout continues, and AWS is set to gain from this and from the next stages of AI, as customers apply AI to their businesses more and more. Meanwhile, Amazon offers a solid track record of earnings growth and has demonstrated its ability to manage turbulent times and go on to grow. For example, the company revamped its cost structure when higher inflation hurt earnings a few years ago and returned to growth within a year. All of this shows that Amazon is well positioned to benefit from the AI boom, but the stock also offers you security thanks to its well-established and profitable e-commerce and cloud businesses. And this means that, whether you're a cautious or aggressive investor, you may, like the billionaires, want to make Amazon one of your key AI bets. Before you buy stock in Amazon, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and Amazon wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $651,049!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $828,224!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 979% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 171% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join . See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of June 2, 2025 John Mackey, former CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Adria Cimino has positions in Amazon. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. This AI Giant Is Among the Top 5 Holdings of Billionaires David Tepper, Philippe Laffont, and Stephen Mandel Jr. -- and It's Not Nvidia was originally published by The Motley Fool
Yahoo
7 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Billionaire David Tepper of Appaloosa Just Sold 5 Prominent Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stocks
Form 13Fs are required quarterly filings that allow investors to track the buying and selling activity of Wall Street's preeminent money managers. Appaloosa's billionaire chief David Tepper completely exited or substantially reduced his fund's stakes in five brand-name artificial intelligence (AI) stocks in the March-ended quarter. Headwinds to the AI revolution are beginning to mount. 10 stocks we like better than Nvidia › Wall Street runs on information, and investors rarely have to look too far for market-moving data. Everything from President Donald Trump's ever-changing tariff and trade policy to earnings season provides clues to investors about the current and future health of corporate America and the U.S. economy. But one of the most-telling of all data releases occurred roughly two weeks ago, on May 15. This was the deadline for institutional investors overseeing at least $100 million to file Form 13F with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Quarterly filed 13Fs detail which stocks, exchange-traded funds, and (select) options Wall Street's top-tier money managers have been buying and selling. Though Warren Buffett is the most well-known of all asset managers, he's far from the only billionaire investor known for their outsized returns or keen stock market insight. Another billionaire fund manager that's proven their chops on the investing front is David Tepper of Appaloosa Management. As of the end of March, Tepper was overseeing close to $8.4 billion in assets under management, which does account for a small number of options contracts. But the detail that stands out most about Tepper's first-quarter trading activity was his net-selling of artificial intelligence (AI) stocks. To be objective, Appaloosa's billionaire chief did do some buying in the AI space. He opened a new position totaling 130,000 shares in AI-networking specialist Broadcom, as well as added 60,000 shares of social media giant Meta Platforms and 20,000 shares of world-leading chip fabricator Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing to existing positions during the first quarter. But there's a night-and-day difference between the amount of selling Tepper undertook in the AI arena, relative to buying. Based on Appaloosa's 13F, Tepper sold shares of five prominent artificial intelligence stocks in the March-ended quarter: Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ: AMD): 1,200,000 shares sold (exited position) Intel (NASDAQ: INTC): 1,000,000 shares sold (exited position) Lam Research (NASDAQ: LRCX): 750,000 shares sold (60% reduction) Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA): 380,001 shares sold (56% reduction) Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT): 460,000 shares sold (47% reduction) It's quite possible this selling activity represents nothing more than simple profit-taking. Excluding Intel, whose stock has underperformed in a big way, shares of Nvidia, Microsoft, AMD, and Lam Research have all rocketed higher as the AI revolution has taken shape. With Tepper's Appaloosa averaging a holding period of around 29 months, he's proven a willingness to ring the register when his positions are in the green. The worry is that there may be more than just benign profit-taking and/or stop losses (in Intel's case) behind Tepper's aggressive net selling of AI stocks. On one hand, demand for AI-graphics processing units (GPUs) and AI solutions has been exceptionally strong. Nvidia's Hopper (H100) and Blackwell GPUs hold a seemingly insurmountable market share lead in AI-accelerated data centers, with AMD in the process of ramping up production of its Instinct AI-accelerating chips. Intel's central processing units (CPUs) are also playing a role in the rapid expansion of AI-data center infrastructure. While these three companies would appear well-positioned to benefit from the ongoing build-out of enterprise data centers, the economics of supply and demand might disagree. For Nvidia, nothing has been more important to its rapid sales and profit growth than AI-GPU scarcity. Demand overwhelming the supply of GPUs has allows Nvidia to place a huge premium on Hopper and Blackwell GPUs. But with AMD and other direct competitors ramping their production, and many of Nvidia's largest customers by net sales internally developing AI chips to use in their data centers, AI-GPU scarcity should meaningfully wane in the coming quarters. This is expected to weigh on Nvidia's pricing power, as well as AMD and possibly even Intel. It also has the potential to adversely impact the pricing power for semiconductor equipment companies like Lam Research, whose equipment plays an important role in packaging the high-bandwidth memory needed in AI-accelerated data centers. The other potential gray cloud for AI stocks that may have encouraged billionaire David Tepper to notably pare down Appaloosa's holdings in this hot trend is the role history has played for next-big-thing technologies and innovations. Since (and including) the advent of the internet in the mid-1990s, every next-big-thing trend has navigated its way through a bubble-bursting event early in its expansion phase. These bubbles form because investors consistently overestimate how quickly a new technology or innovation will gain utility and/or widespread adoption. Even with strong demand for AI hardware, as evidenced by Nvidia's rapid sales growth, most businesses deploying AI solutions haven't yet figured out how to optimize those solutions and/or generate a profit on their AI investments. Every game-changing technology needs time to mature, and AI isn't anywhere close to having reached the point of maturity. If the AI bubble were to burst, we'd see widespread weakness among the five prominent AI stocks Tepper completely exited or reduced in the March-ended quarter. Presumably, no company would be hit harder than Nvidia, which generated more than 90% of its net sales from its data center segment in the fiscal fourth quarter (ended late January). But even Microsoft wouldn't be immune. Though its high-margin software sales with Office and Windows would help insulate the stock from significant downside, growth for its high-margin cloud infrastructure service platform Azure, which incorporates generative AI solutions, would likely slow during an AI bubble-bursting event. With history being undefeated for more than three decades, billionaire David Tepper may be allowing these odds to partially guide his investment strategy. Before you buy stock in Nvidia, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and Nvidia wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $651,761!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $826,263!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 978% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 170% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join . See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of May 19, 2025 Randi Zuckerberg, a former director of market development and spokeswoman for Facebook and sister to Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Sean Williams has positions in Intel and Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Advanced Micro Devices, Intel, Lam Research, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. The Motley Fool recommends Broadcom and recommends the following options: long January 2026 $395 calls on Microsoft, short January 2026 $405 calls on Microsoft, and short May 2025 $30 calls on Intel. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Billionaire David Tepper of Appaloosa Just Sold 5 Prominent Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stocks was originally published by The Motley Fool Error while retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Billionaire Investor David Tepper Sold 56% of His Fund's Stake in Nvidia and Loaded Up on This Market-Beating Transportation Stock Instead
David Tepper and his fund, Appaloosa Management, have been putting up strong returns for decades. Tepper invests heavily in the tech sector, but significantly trimmed his stake in Nvidia in the first quarter of the year. Tepper also poured into a transportation stock that did extremely well over the last five years, and that has many opportunities ahead. 10 stocks we like better than Uber Technologies › Many sports fans may know David Tepper as the owner of the NFL's Carolina Panthers. But in the investing world, Tepper is considered a legend. Between 1993 and 2019, Tepper's fund, Appaloosa Management, generated compound annual returns of more than 25% per year, net of all fees, according to Institutional Investor. Today, Tepper still runs Appaloosa but as a family office, and he's still arguably one of the most influential investors in the market. In the first quarter of 2025, filings show that Appaloosa more than halved its position in the artificial intelligence (AI) chip giant Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), while loading up on a market-beating transportation stock instead. Like many stocks in 2025, Nvidia has had an up-and-down year. It sold off intensely but then rebounded and is currently down only 2% for the year. Earlier in 2025, there were many concerning events that could have caused investors to press the sell button. The first occurred after China's DeepSeek created an artificial intelligence chatbot rivaling OpenAI's ChatGPT, supposedly at a fraction of the cost and with older Nvidia chips. Now, there's much dispute about the level of resources that went into DeepSeek but it caused investors to worry about demand for Nvidia's chips and whether or not more in the AI world could be done with less. Then there were concerns about export restrictions and how that might impact Nvidia's business in China. Former President Joe Biden's administration began to limit the types of chips Nvidia could sell to China, in an effort to prevent China from obtaining semiconductors it could use to build a super computer. Those restrictions ramped up and the Biden administration also tried to close loopholes by preventing Nvidia from selling certain chips to other countries that could then sell them to China. The Trump administration plans to remove some of the Biden-era policies but also implemented its own restrictions that caused Nvidia to take a $5.5 billion charge in the first quarter of the year. While there is still broader market uncertainty, particularly as U.S. Treasury yields surged, investors seem to have renewed faith in AI demand and Nvidia currently trades at a cheaper forward earnings multiple than earlier this year, so it's not a bad time for long-term oriented buyers to buy shares or start dollar-cost averaging again. While selling Nvidia, Tepper and Appaloosa more than doubled their position in the ride-sharing company Uber Technologies (NYSE: UBER). Uber was one of the most highly touted start-ups, but struggled to turn a profit for many years. In 2017, the company brought on Dara Khosrowshahi, who has focused less on growth and more on improving operations. Through a mixture of cost-cutting, price increases, exiting difficult markets like China, and a focus on growing profitable businesses like Uber Eats, Uber managed to turn its first profit in 2023. Since then, profits and revenue continued to grow and the company has also been increasing free cash flow. The stock has crushed the broader market this year and over the last five years. Uber also has an opportunity to be a part of the autonomous vehicle wave. While the company will not build its own self-driving vehicles, it does plan to partner with companies in the autonomous space to help them reach commercialization and integrate autonomous vehicles into Uber's fleet. In a presentation made in the fourth quarter of 2024, management presented the autonomous space as more than a $1 trillion opportunity. The company said that the path to commercialization for companies developing self-driving vehicles faces several obstacles. These include navigating the regulatory landscape, ensuring safety, and having a scalable network and platform. Uber can help on all of these fronts and has already partnered with several large autonomous companies like Waymo and WeRide. Earlier this month, Uber and WeRide announce an expansion of their partnership to roll out autonomous vehicles in 15 cities across the world. Trading at less than 25 times forward earnings, Uber has the opportunity to continue improving profitability and free cash flow, while also potentially tapping into the massive autonomous market over time, presenting a potential new stream of revenue. Before you buy stock in Uber Technologies, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and Uber Technologies wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $639,271!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $804,688!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 957% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 167% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join . See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of May 19, 2025 Bram Berkowitz has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Nvidia and Uber Technologies. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Billionaire Investor David Tepper Sold 56% of His Fund's Stake in Nvidia and Loaded Up on This Market-Beating Transportation Stock Instead was originally published by The Motley Fool Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
Drought conditions improve in western Massachusetts due to recent rainfall
CHICOPEE, Mass. (WWLP) – With all this rain we've been getting, the drought in western Massachusetts has officially come to an end. Cold water and high river levels pose risks for Memorial Day boating While it may mean a lot of dreary skies and wet days in the Pioneer Valley, we can be glad to know that things are returning to normal in our area, according to the Massachusetts Department of Energy and Environmental Affairs (EEA). That means lower risk for forest fires and better water flow throughout the region. Drought conditions continue to affect groundwater levels, however, which typically take longer to recover. The Islands and Southeast Regions still remain at level 1, Mild Drought. Most regions received around 4-6 inches of rain so far this month, while the Cape and Islands saw 1.5-3 inches. 'It is encouraging to see conditions improving and drought lifting in several regions,' said EEA Secretary Tepper. 'While some areas still need time to recover, especially groundwater, this progress is a reminder of how important it is to keep using water wisely as we head into the planting season.' The Drought Management Task Force will meet again on June 9th at 1:00 p.m. For further information on water conservation and what residents can do, visit the EEA's drought and water conservation pages. WWLP-22News, an NBC affiliate, began broadcasting in March 1953 to provide local news, network, syndicated, and local programming to western Massachusetts. Watch the 22News Digital Edition weekdays at 4 p.m. on Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Forbes
21-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
When Will GenAI Finally Deliver Returns On Investment?
Amid all the excitement about GenAI, hard data on investment returns is in short supply Almost a year has passed since a seminal Goldman Sachs research paper posed a deliberately provocative question: 'GenAI – too much spend, too little benefit?'. There was little evidence, some of Goldman's analysts pointed out, of organisations worldwide making much of a return on the $1 trillion they had invested in artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Fast forward to today and there's still no conclusive proof that the AI phenomenon is not a case of the Emperor's new clothes. Recent research from KPMG found that enthusiasm among enterprise leaders for AI remained high, but that none were yet able to point to significant returns on investment. A Forrester paper warned that some executives might start cutting back on AI investment given their impatience for tangible returns. A study from Appen suggests AI project deployments may already be slowing. All of which is music to the ears of David Tepper, co-founder and CEO of Seattle-based start-up Pay-i. Enterprises are right to be sceptical about what GenAI is actually achieving for their businesses, Tepper argues – and they need more scientific methodologies for analysing returns, both ahead of deployments and once new AI projects are up and running. 'C-suite leaders need forecasts of likely returns and reliable proof that they are being achieved,' Tepper says. 'That's how they'll pinpoint which GenAI business cases and deployments are genuinely creating new value.' Pay-i, which is today announcing a $4.9 million seed round, is confident it can provide these leaders with the data they need. It offers tools to help businesses measure the cost of new GenAI initiatives, broken down into granular detail; such costs are currently opaque, Tepper argues, because they depend on a broad range of factors ranging from when and how business users make use of GenAI tools to which cloud architecture that business has opted for. In addition, Pay-i's platform allows businesses to assign specific objectives to AI deployments and then to track the extent to which these objectives are achieved – and what value is realised accordingly. The idea is to give enterprises a means to evaluate both sides of the balance sheet for any given AI use case – what it costs and what it generates. 'Sometimes, even where the AI is doing what you expected, the net figure may still be negative,' Tepper warns. Either way, executives should get a read out on which AI projects to pursue – and which to drop. Securing this visibility is going to become ever more crucial as enterprises invest more and more in AI, argues Lari Hämäläinen, a senior partner at the consultant McKinsey. 'Scaling and managing this responsibly requires two disciplines,' he says. '[You need] Otherwise, businesses are going to start pulling back in larger numbers. An IDC study suggests that while enterprise GenAI investment will top $632 billion by 2028, 72% of CIOs now see measurement and forecasting of returns on investment as their number one blocker. Hence Pay-i's conviction that its valuation tools will find high levels of commercial demand – though the business has only just begun to commercialise, having developed its technology with potential customers. 'The case for investment in GenAI will often be compelling, but businesses need to understand how to make that case with robust data,' adds Tepper, who founded the company with Doron Holan. Both men had previously spent around two decades at Microsoft. The company's seed round is co-led by Fuse Partners and Tola Capital, with participation from Firestreak, Pear VC, Gaia Capital, and angel investors. 'Patience for open-ended GenAI spending is wearing thin,' says John Connors, a former CFO at Microsoft and now operating partner at Fuse. He says Pay-i will give 'leaders the data-backed clarity to invest with conviction, transforming GenAI from an opaque cost center into a growth engine'. Shelia Gulati, managing director of Tola Capital, adds: 'This transparency enables businesses to control their AI spend and allocate resources optimally.'
