Cathie Wood Just Put $6.9 Million Into a Surging Tech Stock Most Investors Aren’t Watching

The way Cathie Wood continues to expand her holdings while half of Wall Street ignores her is almost stubborn. Her flagship Ark Innovation ETF purchased 83,764 shares of Core last week between March 30 and April 1.The cloud infrastructure startup Weave, supported by Nvidia, is still difficult for the majority of ordinary investors to pronounce. With shares closing at about $82, the total came to about $6.9 million. It’s the kind of action that usually has a lasting impact but doesn’t make front-page news.

The fact that CoreWeave isn’t well-known contributes to its allure. The business operates data centers filled with Nvidia GPUs, the type of hardware that powers AI training for customers like Microsoft and Google. If you were to walk through one of its facilities, you would hear the low electrical drone of racks pushing through workloads that no human could manually schedule, as well as the continuous hum of cooling systems. It’s the plumbing of the AI economy, but it’s unglamorous work. Wood seems to think that the real money is still hidden in the plumbing.

However, her timing is odd. The S&P 500 has dropped by a more moderate 3.8% year to date, while the Ark Innovation ETF is down roughly 12%. Over the last 12 months, investors have taken out about $1.2 billion from the fund; in the last month alone, an additional $40 million has left. As this develops, it seems as though Wood is strengthening her convictions at the exact moment when the market would prefer that she issue an apology.

She is not expressing regret. She referred to the upcoming period as a “great acceleration,” not a decline, in a Bloomberg podcast last month. According to her, the cost of AI training is decreasing by 75% annually, and the cost of inference is decreasing even more quickly. Simplified, she argues that the companies that supply the picks and shovels—the GPUs, the data centers, the orchestration software—will profit disproportionately from the collapse of the intelligence cost curve. She might be correct. She may also be early, similar to how she was early on Tesla, late, and then early once more.

The latest financial results from CoreWeave reveal a convoluted tale. Revenue for the fourth quarter increased 110% year over year to $1.57 billion, just above forecasts. However, the loss per share was greater than anticipated, and the company’s first-quarter guidance of between $1.9 billion and $2 billion fell short of analysts’ expectations. The stock swayed before stealthily rising again. Despite the Nasdaq’s overall decline of about 6% due to rising energy prices and tensions in the Middle East, CRWV is up about 15% for the year as of early April.

Citing CoreWeave’s positioning in what he described as a $79 billion market for AI infrastructure as a service, Tal Liani of Bank of America upgraded the stock to buy in late March with a $100 price target. The three pillars of the argument are partnerships with Nvidia and OpenAI, proprietary software tailored for those workloads, and the ongoing demand for AI compute. It’s another matter entirely whether all three legs can withstand pressure.

It’s difficult to ignore the pattern. When the room is empty, Wood purchases. That pays off sometimes. It doesn’t always. This $6.9 million is more of a tell than a thesis statement because CoreWeave is still not even among Ark Innovation’s top ten holdings. She is watching, building, and waiting for the rest of the market to catch up. The part that no one can guarantee is whether they do and when.