By Leo Sun
Publication Date: 2026-01-23 21:05:00
Ark Invest’s Cathie Wood is a polarizing figure among investors. Wood’s supporters praise her for boldly adding growth stocks to Ark’s exchange-traded funds (ETFs), but her critics claim she ignores valuations, sells winners too early, and holds losers too long.
Ark sold most of its Nvidia (NVDA +1.54%) shares in 2022 and 2023, right before the AI boom drove its stock to record highs. Over the past three years, its stock has surged more than 950%, while Wood’s flagship Ark Innovation ETF (ARKK 1.86%) has risen about 120%. Over the past year, Wood gradually rebuilt a smaller stake in Nvidia at much higher prices.
Image source: Getty Images.
That messy trade suggests that we should take Wood’s predictions with a grain of salt. That said, many growth-oriented investors still closely follow Wood’s claims.
In Ark’s latest “Big Ideas 2026” report, Wood warns that Nvidia will face tougher competition from AMD (AMD +2.29%) in the AI market this year. Should investors expect the underdog to catch up to Nvidia, or is Wood glossing over some of Nvidia’s key competitive advantages?
What are Nvidia’s core strengths?
Nvidia once mainly sold its discrete GPUs for high-end gaming PCs. Yet over the past two decades, it has gradually expanded into the data center market by launching more powerful GPUs for processing machine learning and AI tasks. Unlike CPUs, which are optimized for sequential tasks, GPUs are designed to execute parallel tasks — which allow them to simultaneously…
