MW These renowned investors were asked for their top AI stocks. Here's what they said.
By Barbara Kollmeyer
Keep the faith in memory chips and Google, say investors
South Korean memory chip maker SK Hynix is one stock some big investors are betting on right now.
It's looking like a struggle for direction on Tuesday, as investors look to quarterly updates to fill the void from data locked up by the government shutdown.
The never-ending debate these days over whether AI investments are going to pay off gets another shakedown with our call of the day, where a handful of big tech investors discussed their thoughts.
The discussion at last week's J.P. Morgan/Robinhood Investors Conference was shared by one participant, Josh Wolfe, co-founder and managing partner at Lux Capital, which has over $5 billion under management, invested in emerging science and technology. Wolfe personally is heavily invested in AI through private investment but hedged that with a short position in the QQQ QQQ, an ETF that tracks the Nasdaq-100 Index NDX.
Moderating the panel was Chase Coleman, founder and managing partner at Tiger Global Management, which manages just under $70 billion, Coleman, who doesn't make many public appearances, fired off several questions, such as what was the panelists favorite AI beneficiaries.
The first answer came from panelist Andrew Homan, managing partner at privately held AI investment fund Maverick Silicon, a newish spinoff of the $10 billion Maverick Capital hedge fund, where he spent two decades. Maverick Capital is know for its early investments in Nvidia (NVDA).
Homan flagged South Korean memory chip maker SK Hynix (KR:000660) as his AI beneficiary pick. "When you look at each generation of Nvidia chip or Google GPU, memory is the one piece of the build materials that continues to grow each generation, and so they are capturing more and more value," he said.
SK Hynix dominates within "critical memory that's used for AI models," and is in a business that has "fundamental supply limitation" where capacity can't be brought online as fast as possible, and that will weigh on memory chip supply. Homan also said that he expects SK Hynix will grow its book value, which is a company's net worth defined as total assets minus all liabilities, by 50% in 2026.
Next it was the turn of panelist Brad Gershner, Altimeter Capital founder and CEO, who according to Forbes manages $20 billion across his public equity and private startups and a long-time investor in Google parent Alphabet $(GOOGL)$.
In the last 15 years, "scale has led to bigger advantages in the age of AI where compute and data are massive advantages. I think these scale advantages will continue," said Gershner. "If you said to me I had to put all my money in two stocks it would be in Nvidia and OpenAI today because I think they have massive scale advantages. I think ChatGPT is the winner in consumer AI."
Lastly chiming in was Wolfe himself, who said Google was his long big megacap pick, a view he has laid out on X. "Google will Microsoft a lot of the large foundation models," he said - that means Google will give away products for free, just as it's done with its online rival products to Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. He has also said Google's Gemini 3 will be better than rivals and pricing will drop "so low to near free the capex spend of all the others will seem crazy."
Wolfe also mentioned a next generation defense company that they are putting money in, Anduril, which he believes will be a leader and a $50 billion-plus public IPO, with $3 billion of top-line revenue and high growth.
The markets
U.S. stock futures (ES00) (YM00) (NQ00) are flat, with the 10-year Treasury yield BX:TMUBMUSD10Y holding under 4%. Gold (GC00) is lower and bitcoin (BTCUSD) is weaker.
Key asset performance Last 5d 1m YTD 1y S&P 500 6735.13 1.21% 0.62% 14.51% 15.05% Nasdaq Composite 22,990.54 1.30% 0.88% 19.06% 24.01% 10-year Treasury 3.986 -4.70 -12.10 -59.00 -22.80 Gold 4340.9 5.11% 14.80% 64.47% 58.75% Oil 57.11 -4.11% -8.39% -20.54% -18.16% Data: MarketWatch. Treasury yields change expressed in basis points
The buzz
GE Aerospace $(GE)$ and General Motors $(GM)$ shares are rising after their results, as Netflix $(NFLX)$ reports after the close.
Amazon's (AMZN) Web Services arm says its service has recovered and that will provide an assessment of what went wrong with Monday's massive outage at a later date.
Zions Bancorp $(ZION)$ late Monday reported earnings ahead of estimates, and shares are rising. Citigroup analysts say the regional banking crisis is a buying opportunity, and no comparison to the 2008 meltdown.
Beyond Meat shares (BYND) are up nearly 30% in premarket. The plant-based burger company's stock has surged in recent days, with meme-stock traders on Reddit getting some credit.
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-Barbara Kollmeyer
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October 21, 2025 06:59 ET (10:59 GMT)
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