Billionaire fund manager, skeptical of AI, backs shocking stock

Samuel O'Brient

Sat, May 24, 2025, 9:47 AM 4 min read

A highly controversial figure in some circles, Ken Griffin remains one of Wall Street’s most prominent and respected hedge fund managers.

Since founding Miami-based hedge fund Citadel Securities in 1990, Griffin has amassed a net worth of more than $44 billion. This makes him one of the highest-earning people in his field, second only to Israel Englander of Millennium Management.

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While Citadel’s aggressive trading strategy has garnered criticism over the years, the fund’s success is undeniable, as evidenced by the fact that it reported its largest trading revenue haul to date in March 2025, with 55% gains for the year.

As the artificial intelligence (AI) boom has minted a new generation of market winners over the past several years, some financiers have embraced this new technology. Griffin has taken a different approach and expressed some skepticism. But some recent filings reveal he sees potential in one AI stock.

Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, many companies have focused on tapping into this booming market, from established tech-sector leaders to new, cutting-edge startups. Through it all, both retail and institutional investors have been working hard to identify the next winners before they surge.

Related: Billionaire fund manager unloads over $100 million of Tesla stock

For many, that meant trying to find the next Nvidia  (NVDA) . Often considered the industry’s most prominent chipmaker, the tech-sector giant has become synonymous with the AI boom, as its shares surged to new heights and analysts heaped praise on the stock.

Despite its track record, Griffin isn’t so bullish on Nvidia’s growth prospects. During the first quarter of 2025, Citadel slashed its NVDA stock position roughly in half, selling 1,555,264 shares. Data shows that this puts it among the fund’s top sells by change in portfolio percentage.

Griffin hasn’t embraced AI as much as some of his peers, maintaining a skeptical outlook toward the technology’s overall impact.

“Do we use it in our investment business? A little bit, a little bit. I can’t say it’s been game-changing,” he recently stated. “It saves some time. It’s a productivity enhancement tool. It’s nice [but] I don’t think it’s going to revolutionize most of what we do in finance.”

He added that generative AI models are limited as investment analysis tools, since they are still unable to produce long-term forecasts.

While Citadel trimmed its stake in Nvidia in Q1, it doubled down on one of the chipmaker’s biggest rivals. Advanced Micro Devices  (AMD)  also produces graphics processing units (GPUs) that help companies build and scale large language models (LLMs).