Cathie Wood appears to have made a sharp choice inside the same AI trade. ARK Invest’s August 28 transaction disclosure showed sales of 156,286 shares of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMD) and purchases of 243,707 shares of NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA). Based on the August 28 closing prices, the moves were worth an estimated $72.8 million and $53.0 million, respectively. ARK also bought Broadcom, making the message look less like a retreat from AI chips than a reordering of which suppliers offer the best risk-adjusted exposure.
The bull case for the switch is execution. NVIDIA Corporation reported quarterly revenue of $96.2 billion, including $89 billion from its data-center business. Its scale, software ecosystem, and ability to sell complete systems give it a clearer path to monetizing every new cluster. Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. is growing rapidly from a smaller base, with second-quarter revenue up 50% and data-center revenue up 107%, but it still has to convert product momentum into durable share gains against a rival that sets much of the market’s pace.
That does not make AMD the obvious loser. Its Instinct accelerators and EPYC server processors give customers a credible second source, while hyperscalers have strong incentives to prevent one vendor from controlling their economics. If AMD keeps improving its software and wins larger deployments, its smaller revenue base could produce more upside. Nvidia’s strength also creates its own bear case: enormous expectations, customer concentration, export restrictions, and the risk that buyers increasingly favor custom silicon can punish even excellent results.
ARK’s filing does not disclose its rationale. The same-day trade reduced AMD exposure and increased Nvidia exposure, but it does not mean AMD’s thesis has broken. Hedge-fund holder counts rose for both names. At the end of Q2, 164 hedge funds owned AMD, up from 134 one quarter earlier, while Nvidia ownership rose to 285 funds from 275. Marshall Wace increased its AMD common-share position 3% to 3.9 million shares, and Fisher Asset Management raised its Nvidia stake 3% to 90.9 million shares.
AMD’s reported short positioning was not exceptionally high. As of the August 14 settlement date, 40.1 million shares were sold short, equal to 2.47% of the float and 1.5 days of average trading volume. The trade is striking, but the fuller picture is a two-winner market: Nvidia offers the cleaner execution story, while AMD offers the more demanding and potentially more explosive share-gain story.
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