Cathie Wood Bets $26M on SpaceX, Pours Into AI Chips Play CoreWeave

Cathie Wood's Ark Invest closed out July 2026 with one of its clearest portfolio statements in months: roughly $26 million into SpaceX ahead of the rocket company's first-ever public earnings report, another $15.5 million into AI chip cloud provider CoreWeave, and $14.3 million into Tesla — funded in part by trims to Shopify and other software and e-commerce holdings.111 The trades, disclosed through Ark's daily fund filings, mark a deliberate rotation toward the picks-and-shovels layer of the artificial intelligence economy, and they land at a moment when investors are actively debating whether the AI infrastructure buildout is a bubble or the largest capital-spending cycle in modern history. ## The Trades: A Week-Long Tilt Into AI Infrastructure Across the final week of July, SpaceX was Ark's single largest purchase by value, with more than 358,000 shares spread across several of the firm's actively managed ETFs, including the flagship ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK).11 CoreWeave (CRWV), the Nvidia-backed GPU cloud provider that rents out AI computing capacity to hyperscalers and AI labs, was added after its shares slid roughly 15% during the same week — classic Ark behavior of buying weakness in high-conviction names.11 Tesla, long Wood's largest holding, got fresh money as the EV maker traded near a 52-week low.11 The funding came from the other side of the ledger: Shopify was cut by roughly $12.7 million, while Ark also trimmed 10x Genomics, CRISPR Therapeutics, Snowflake, Robinhood, and Deere.111 Benzinga's coverage of the same filings adds that the buying extended across the AI chip supply chain, with additional exposure to Nvidia, Taiwan Semiconductor, and Meta Platforms, alongside defense-oriented names such as Rocket Lab and Kratos Defense.1 The pattern, as one analysis put it, is a concentration of capital into AI infrastructure, space, and autonomy at the direct expense of software, e-commerce, and internet holdings.11 ## Why CoreWeave Is the Tell The CoreWeave purchase deserves the most attention, because it is where the AI chips thesis becomes explicit. CoreWeave is not a chipmaker — it is the layer above the chipmakers. Its data centers run on Nvidia silicon, and its major customers include Google and Microsoft, meaning every CoreWeave share is effectively a levered bet on sustained demand for GPU compute. Ark has been trading the name aggressively all year. In early May, after CoreWeave dropped 11% on weaker-than-expected second-quarter revenue guidance, Ark bought 113,076 shares worth roughly $12.9 million — only days after selling nearly 198,000 shares at higher prices. The July accumulation continues that pattern of buying every meaningful dip.11 The fundamental case that Ark is underwriting centers on power and pricing. CoreWeave's CEO has said the company has reached "hyperscale," with more than 3.5 gigawatts of contracted power and a backlog growing by roughly $30 billion in a single quarter, with inference — the running of live AI models, as opposed to one-time training — accounting for more than half of its compute usage. That inference-heavy mix matters for the AI chips story, because it suggests demand for silicon is shifting from a handful of massive training runs to a broader, recurring base of production workloads, which is exactly the durability skeptics have been asking for. ## SpaceX's Earnings Debut Became an AI Chip Story Too The SpaceX buy was positioned by most coverage as a bet on space, but the company's first earnings report — delivered in early August — revealed that the real story inside SpaceX is now AI capex. The company posted second-quarter revenue of $7.81 billion, up 92% year over year and well above the roughly $6.93 billion analysts expected, with a narrower-than-expected loss.15 Yet the stock sank 13.6% the following day, because capital expenditures had jumped sixfold to $18.4 billion — with most of that spending directed toward AI.15 SpaceX has been quietly assembling an AI compute business on top of its rocket and Starlink operations. It signed a deal giving AI startup Reflection AI access to Nvidia GB300 chips for $150 million per month through 2029, a contract potentially worth about $6.3 billion, and has separate computing agreements with Anthropic, Google, and Cursor.7 Wood's response to the capex-driven selloff was to buy more: in late August, Ark funds purchased another 205,031 SpaceX shares worth about $28.1 million as the stock traded near its $135 IPO price.15 SpaceX's CFO has argued the spending is self-funding, telling investors that on the AI compute side, capital is being deployed in a way that achieves "less than a one-year payback."15 Ark's own valuation work is aggressive: internal models project a base-case enterprise value of $2.5 trillion for SpaceX by 2030, with a bull case around $3.1 trillion, against the roughly $350 billion private valuation the company carried in 2024.24 ## The October Reversal: Selling SpaceX to Fund More CoreWeave The most instructive wrinkle in this story is what happened two months later. On October 6 and 7, Ark did something that cut against the July narrative: it sold SpaceX and bought even more CoreWeave. On Tuesday, October 6, Ark sold 54,873 SpaceX shares through its ARK Next Generation Internet ETF, worth roughly $9.4 million at the $171.92 close, while buying 97,639 CoreWeave shares worth about $8.5 million.163 The next day, it added another 214,589 CoreWeave shares across ARKK and ARKW, worth approximately $19.68 million, while selling roughly $17 million of Robinhood. The reported catalysts are squarely in the AI chips lane. SpaceX is reportedly pursuing a financing plan involving about $10 billion in bank loans and $30 billion in investment-grade debt to fund planned Nvidia chip purchases — news that pressured the stock on concerns about capital intensity.16 SpaceX also faces a share unlock on October 9, when up to 328.4 million early-investor shares become eligible for sale.16 Meanwhile, CoreWeave just hosted its Fully Connected 2026 event, where it introduced Forge, a platform for developing and optimizing AI models and agents, and analysts have been leaning bullish: Rosenblatt carries a Street-high $250 price target citing pricing power as demand remains strong, while Compass Point reiterated a $150 target. The contrast in analyst sentiment is striking — CoreWeave's average price target implies roughly 55% upside versus about 25% for SpaceX.16 ## Where the Reporting Diverges The sources agree on the facts of the trades — the dollar amounts and share counts are consistent across Benzinga, GuruFocus, and the daily filings reported by Investing.com.11112 Where coverage diverges is on interpretation. Bull-leaning coverage frames Wood's buying as a conviction play on AI infrastructure demand that "remains intact despite recent volatility."1 More skeptical coverage notes the awkward mathematics of Ark's own track record: the ARK Innovation ETF has delivered a five-year annualized return of negative 6.23% against the S&P 500's 11.56%, with roughly $2.91 billion in net outflows over the past year, and Morningstar analysis found ARKK destroyed nearly $5 billion in investor wealth over the decade ended 2025.15 Wood herself has rejected AI bubble talk, arguing the technology is deflationary — with AI training costs dropping 75% per year and inference costs falling as much as 85% to 98% annually — and that the "most powerful capital spending cycle in history" is still ahead. ## The Reading: Ark Is Making a Chips-Over-Applications Bet Taken together, the July buys and the October reversal tell a coherent story, and it is one that investors watching the AI chips trade should take seriously. Ark is not merely buying "AI stocks" — it is systematically selling the application layer (Shopify, software, e-commerce, fintech like Robinhood) and redeploying into the compute layer: CoreWeave's GPU cloud, Nvidia and TSMC's silicon supply chain, and SpaceX's emergent orbital-and-terrestrial AI infrastructure play.111 The October SpaceX trim does not contradict that thesis; it refines it. Wood appears willing to fund CoreWeave purchases by trimming even her highest-profile space holding when its Nvidia chip purchases require $40 billion in new debt — suggesting that within AI infrastructure, Ark is prioritizing the operator with contracted revenue and demonstrated pricing power over the one still raising capital to build.16 That is a meaningful signal for the broader AI chips market. If one of the most prominent disruptive-tech investors is rotating within the theme toward GPU cloud capacity and away from space-adjacent AI capex stories, it suggests the next phase of the AI trade will be judged not on vision but on payback periods — exactly the metric SpaceX's CFO was forced to defend, and exactly where CoreWeave's inference-heavy backlog currently looks strongest.15