By Carolina Mandl
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Hedge fund Coatue Management founder Philippe Laffont said on Tuesday he is concerned about how geopolitical conflicts could affect the chip industry and the development of artificial intelligence, including Nvidia (NASDAQ:).
Speaking at the Bloomberg Invest conference, Laffont said that if China were to invade Taiwan, it would disrupt chip production as most of the industry's capital spending is concentrated on the island with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which counts Nvidia as one. of its main clients.
“That's very risky because the largest market capitalization depends on production in Taiwan,” he said of the risks posed to ai chipmaker Nvidia.
Last week, Nvidia became the most valuable company at $3.3 trillion. As of Tuesday, it was the third-largest company by market capitalization, behind Microsoft (NASDAQ and Apple (NASDAQ ).
Coatue closed March with approximately $1.3 billion invested in Nvidia, according to a filing with the stock exchange. Laffont did not mention his current position.
!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s){if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod? n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version=’2.0′;n.queue=();t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0;t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)(0);s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window, document,’script’,’https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js’);
