Andrew Curtayne: Milford Asset Management expert on the tech companies catching the attention of investors

AI and technology stocks are continuing to have a significant presence in the market - but which companies are leading the charge?

Broadcom and Oracle are among the companies that have generated positive results, and Nvidia made headlines following its $100 billion investment in OpenAI.

Milford Asset Management's Andrew Curtayne explained further.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
To Andrew Curtaine Milford Asset Management, Andrew good Evening.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Ednan Ryan, how are you very well?

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Thank you. We've been watching the tech stocks and we've
been watching the AI stocks leading this market higher and
higher over in the US. What's the latest investors, you know,
what companies have you been looking at? What are investors
focus on?

Speaker 2 (00:20):
You know, they really continued to rally pretty much each
month you see them higher. There's been over the last
a few weeks. There has been a number of key
pieces a news couple of US result based. You had
two large companies, one called Oracle that people will be
familiar with, Larry Allison sort of the key key shareholder
on that stop that had an incredible result where they

(00:41):
now it'ced three hundred billion dollars of new contracts for
AI cloud services. That's just like ridiculously big numbers, which yeah,
I think the chef has rallied over thirty percent on
that one day alone, put Oracle into around about the
top ten largest companies in the US, and Larry Allison
himself owns about forty five percent of that business. So

(01:01):
I think very shortly went past Elon Musk as the
richest man in the world. So yeah, fantastic performance from
that business. Another company called Broadcom, which which sells chips,
which largely compete with Navidia, has also had a strong
results and upgraded numbers, and amongst most other pieces of news,
Google sort of getting it's kind of in its mojo

(01:22):
going with Gemini, which is its AI product, and that's
getting a lot of tensions. So share price has been
doing well there. And then just two days ago Navidio
made an announcement that they're going to invest one hundred
billion dollars in open Ai, which is the company that
owns chat GPT, and that got the market pretty excited,
and Navidia shares are up three or four percent on

(01:44):
That is.

Speaker 1 (01:45):
The worry that you've got huge investments some of these companies,
and then one will invest in the other, the other
will invest back in that one, and it could be
creating some kind of bubble. I mean, even just the
level of which the markets rising, it doesn't indicate bubble territory.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
Yeah, there's certainly been a growing view from some investors
that were starting to look bubble like, and they make
comparisons to the dot com or the Internet bubble era
that happened in the late nineties early two thousands. One
piece that Navidia invests and I mentioned which she used
to correctly point out on the secularity there. It is
a little bit circular. And what they're doing is they're

(02:26):
investing one hundred billion dollars in open AI, who was
then taking that one hundred billion dollars and using it
to buy, amongst other things, chips from Navidia. So it's
kind of like the given the company to buy their
own products. So a bit circular, and it causes concern.
And there was elements of that or that was happening
in various ways in the Internet bubble. And then of

(02:47):
course the evaluations that some of these stocks are getting higher.
So you're certainly seeing a growing yeah, of course, of
people getting a little bit concerned and some people you
see some investors that have taken a little bit of
risk off some of their stocks.

Speaker 1 (02:59):
It's interesting because when you look at that from a
practical personal perspective, you know, I look at it and
I think, well, I can see why it's going up,
because if I look at my use of AI just
in the past six months or they alone a year
is also going up. So I'm like, maybe they're you know,
it's justified.

Speaker 2 (03:18):
Yeah, and that's that's certainly what all the big companies
in the world there, the Microsoft's and Google's amazons, and
that's what they believe. They think the AI use case
is there. They think it's getting the use cases are
getting better and better, and you certainly are seeing that.
I mean, chichibt is so much better now than it
was two years ago when it came onto the scene,

(03:39):
and so they convinced that AI is the next technological
jug Therefore they're willing to invest hundreds of billions of dollars.
So currently there's this estimated about six hundred billion per
anim has been invested into AI data centers. That number
is expected to grow potentially to one or just over
one trillion dollars over the next couple years. And even

(04:01):
a big sit oft AO ball At Jensen Huang, who's
the CEO of Navidia, is putting out numbers saying there
might be three trillion dollars of ann you'll spend on
AI data centers, which is phenomenal. You're talking about three
trilling You're talking something like three to four percent of
global GDP. So well, you've got these companies who believe
in AI and believe in the product, then they can

(04:22):
keep putting the money, and the profitable companies, largest in
the world, they can keep fueling this kind of spending.

Speaker 1 (04:26):
Spring fascinating stuff. Andrew, appreciate your time tonight, Andrew Kurchain,
Milford Asset Management.

Speaker 2 (04:32):
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