Philippe Laffont is betting that investors don’t need to pick the winner of the artificial-intelligence chip race to profit from it. The founder of Coatue Management said one of the firm’s preferred ways to gain exposure to AI is through semiconductor manufacturers and equipment suppliers, which is why he holds Taiwan Semiconductor, Lam Research and Applied Materials among his largest investments. “Sometimes you can capture some of these stocks through others,” Laffont said Tuesday on CNBC’s ” Squawk Box .” “You’ve got Nvidia , you’ve got Amazon with a Trainium chip. You’ve got Google with a TPU chip. You’ve got newcomers on the GPU side. All of them at the end of the day will need the same machines.” The approach reflects a picks-and-shovels strategy toward the AI boom. As technology companies race to build data centers and develop increasingly powerful AI processors, demand for the equipment used to manufacture those chips has surged. “If I’m a supplier to the fabs, I don’t need to make an exact bet on which of the chips is going to win,” said Laffont, an MIT grad and veteran of Julian Robertson’s legendary Tiger Management. “That’s sort of the reasons why we own the semi caps,” he said, a reference to semiconductor capital equipment stocks. The hedge fund star, now overseeing $90 billion, noted that he previously sold Nvidia too early, missing part of the stock’s meteoric rise. Laffont said Nvidia is now a “very cheap” stock after falling about 12% from its recent peak.
