By Khac Phu Nguyen
Publication Date: 2025-11-18 17:47:00
This article first appeared on GuruFocus.
Databricks Inc. is back in the spotlight, reportedly chasing a valuation north of $130 billion at a time when parts of the market are wondering whether the AI wave is moving a little too fast. The Information reported that the company is in early talks to raise fresh capital for hiring and acquisitions, a move that could represent a roughly 30% valuation jump from its September round backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Insight Partners. It’s a bold swing for a firm built on helping companies analyze messy, multi-source data and build AI applications atop platforms like Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Azure and Amazon’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) AWS, while increasingly edging into the territory of giants such as Oracle and Snowflake.
But this new valuation push arrives as some of the sector’s biggest believers are quietly shifting to the sidelines. Peter Thiel’s hedge fund Thiel Macro LLC sold its entire Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) stake in the third quarter, just days after SoftBank also disclosed its exit. At the same time, Michael Burry (Trades, Portfolio) has taken bearish positions against both Nvidia and Palantir Technologies Inc., tapping into broader unease that this rapid-fire cycle of chipmakers, data-center operators, and AI startups trading multibillion-dollar commitments could be creating an ecosystem that feeds on itself more than on proven demand. The backdrop is a market spending potentially trillions on data centers and…
