Cathie Wood, chief of Ark Investment Management, likes to take advantage of IPOs.
Cathie Wood, founder and CEO of Ark Investment Management, likes to jump into some of Wall Street’s hottest IPOs.
In recent years, Wood’s Ark funds have bought shares of newly public companies, including Tempus AI (TEM), Coinbase (COIN), and CoreWeave (CRWV), as Wood doubles down on disruptive technology themes tied to AI, electric vehicles, and cloud infrastructure.
Now, Wood is making another IPO bet.
In 2025, Wood’s flagship Ark Innovation ETF gained 35.49%, far outpacing the S&P 500’s return of 17.88% in the same period. So far this year, Wood’s flagship Ark Innovation ETF (ARKK) was down roughly 1.89%, trailing the S&P 500’s gain of 9.17%.
Wood gained a reputation after the Ark Innovation ETF delivered a 153% return in 2020. But her style also brings painful losses in bearish markets, as seen in 2022, when the Ark Innovation ETF tumbled more than 60%.
Those swings have weighed on Wood’s long-term gains. As of May 22, the Ark Innovation ETF has delivered a five-year annualized return of -6.16%, while the S&P 500 has an annualized return of 14.09% over the same period, according to data from Morningstar.
Cathie Wood expects a “great acceleration” brought by technology developments
Wood focuses on high-tech companies across artificial intelligence, blockchain, biomedical technology, and robotics. She thinks these businesses have strong growth potential, though their volatility often causes fluctuations in the Ark’s funds.
According to Morningstar analyst Bella Albrecht, two of Wood’s Ark funds were among the worst-performing ETFs in the first quarter of 2026. The Ark Next Generation Internet ETF (ARKW) ranked second on the list, while the ARK Innovation ETF placed fifth.
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From 2014 to 2024, the Ark Innovation ETF wiped out $7 billion in investor wealth, according to an analysis by Morningstar’s analyst Amy Arnott. That made it the third-biggest wealth destroyer among mutual funds and ETFs in Arnott’s ranking. The analyst hasn’t updated the 2025 ranking.
In a March Bloomberg podcast, Wood says the global economy is not heading into a downturn, but into what she calls a “great acceleration” driven by AI and other breakthrough technologies.
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“We’re not going into the Great Depression, we’re going into the great acceleration,” Wood said, pointing to how past technological revolutions reshaped economic growth.
She noted that global real GDP growth averaged just 0.6% between 1500 and 1900, before the Industrial Revolution lifted it to around 3% for more than a century. Now, she argues, a new wave of innovation could push growth much higher.
“We think [technologies] are going to take growth into the 7 to 8% range,” Wood said, adding that the number may actually be conservative.
Wood also emphasized that AI is rapidly driving down costs across industries.
“These technologies are deflationary,” she said. “AI training costs are dropping 75% per year, and inference costs are falling as much as 85% to even 98% annually.”
In an earlier letter published in January, Wood rejects the “AI bubble” talk, saying it “is years away” and “the most powerful capital spending cycle in history” is coming.
“What once was the cap in spending seems to have become a floor now that the AI, robotics, energy storage, blockchain technology, and multiomics sequencing platforms are ready for prime time,” she said.
But not all investors agree with Wood’s optimism. In the 12 months through May 21, the Ark Innovation ETF saw roughly $1.05 billion in net outflows, according to data from ETF research firm VettaFi.
Cathie Wood buys $32 million of Cerebras stock
On May 20 and 22, Wood’s Ark funds bought 124,905 shares of Cerebras Systems Inc. (CBRS), according to Ark’s daily trade information. These shares are valued at about $32.07 million as of the latest closing price of $256.78.
This trade follows Wood’s earlier purchase made on May 14 and 15, when she bought a total of 254,792 Cerebras shares following the company’s market debut.
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Shares of Cerebras surged 68% on May 14, its debut day, closing at $311.07 after pricing its IPO at $185 per share, well above the company’s expected range.
The company sold 30 million shares in the offering, raising about $5.55 billion in the largest U.S. tech IPO since Uber Technologies’ 2019 debut, CNBC reported.
Wall Street has been pouring into chip stocks as demand for computing power and data center infrastructure continues to grow. The rally has lifted shares of companies including NVIDIA Corp. (NVDA), Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), Micron Technology Inc. (MU) and Intel Corp. (INTC) this year.
Cerebras is trying to compete with Nvidia in the high-end chip market. Its flagship Wafer Scale Engine 3 differs from traditional chip architectures by being built on a single silicon wafer rather than multiple interconnected chips, unlike Nvidia’s GPU-based approach. The company says this structure can offer speed and cost advantages over Nvidia’s GPU.
“There’s some whales out there, there’s some really big customers,” Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman said in a CNBC interview. “That is one of the characteristics of this market.”
Cerebras has also been shifting away from simply selling hardware systems and moving further into cloud services powered by its own chips, competing with infrastructure and cloud providers including Alphabet (GOOGL), Microsoft (MSFT), Oracle (ORCL) and CoreWeave (CRWV).
Cerebras reported revenue of $510 million in 2025, representing year-on-year growth of 76%. The company also posted net income of $88 million after recording a $481.6 million loss a year earlier.
Cerebras stock climbed as high as $386 during its first week of trading before pulling back to close at $256.78 on May 22. The stock is not yet in the top 10 holdings of Wood’s Ark Innovation ETF.
Top 10 holdings of the Ark Innovation ETF as of May 22, 2026:
- Tesla Inc. (TSLA) 10.54%
- Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) 5.14%
- Circle Internet Group Inc. (CRCL) 4.85%
- Tempus AI Inc. (TEM) 4.72%
- CRISPR Therapeutics AG (CRSP) 4.69%
- Robinhood Markets Inc. (HOOD) 4.43%
- Coinbase Global Inc. (COIN) 4.31%
- Roku Inc. (ROKU) 4.29%
- Shopify Inc. (SHOP) 4.13%
- Palantir Technologies Inc. (PLTR) 3.06%
Just as Wood has been aggressively buying newer AI infrastructure names like Cerebras, she has also been trimming holdings in semiconductor companies such as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM).
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