Michael Burry's big short on AI just got a whole lot bigger.
Tesla, Caterpillar, semiconductor manufacturer Applied Materials and an ETF tracking chip makers are among the latest bearish bets announced by Burry, one of the heroes of Michael Lewis's financial-crisis saga, "The Big Short."
The positions are part of a monthslong wager designed to pay off if the hype around artificial intelligence sours.
The bets come at a precarious time for the industry, with the U.S. government intervening in the release of Anthropic's Mythos-class model over national-security concerns, and the sticker shock of AI usage leading companies like Microsoft to roll out lower-cost options.
For Burry, plans by two of South Korea's largest tech companies to build a chip hub set off fresh alarm bells about whether the massive sums of money being poured into AI can ever pay off. Samsung and SK Hynix said earlier this week they plan to invest more than $500 billion to create the hub. The following day, chip stocks led the Nasdaq higher.
"The proximate cause of today's rally is big spending announced out of Korea," Burry wrote on his Substack on Tuesday. "Well, I see that as the beginning of the end."
Burry has been an outspoken critic of the stock market's AI mania, saying that investors are getting ahead of themselves in bidding up the price of some of the industry's biggest companies, and warning that they are glazing over risks. Known for his idiosyncratic personality, Burry has gained a huge following online for correctly betting against the U.S. housing market during the 2008-09 financial crisis.
One of his updated bets uses put options on an exchange-traded fund that tracks a semiconductor index that includes Micron Technology and Advanced Micro Devices. The bet against the ETF, which trades under the ticker SOXX, pays off in March if it drops about a third from its peak. Burry previously had options that paid off on a steeper drop by January.
"The SOXX itself is a pure form of overvaluation in an index, a form that is rarely seen and never so easily recognized as such," he said.
He also took aim at Caterpillar, which he noted had done well for him "on the long side" in the past. Burry didn't elaborate much on the reasons for this short, but the company's equipment is used to build out data centers and chip-manufacturing hubs. Its shares have climbed in recent months.
Burry's notes, which tend to dive into the minutiae of the reasoning behind his shorts, were relatively spare this time around. His short on Elon Musk's electric-vehicle maker, which is racing to bring autonomous driving to the masses, was noted with a price target of $416.22. Burry has bet against Tesla before.
Burry also added to a monthslong short of Nvidia.
In November, Burry revealed bets that Nvidia and Palantir shares would drop sharply by 2027, though for different reasons. He cited Nvidia's use of circular financing deals to help fund some of its biggest customers, which he thought could lead to a dot-com-like blowup. Palantir was too reliant on government contracts and could be replaced by competitors, he argued.
The shorts attracted fierce criticism at the time, with Nvidia denying any issues with its financing, and Palantir CEO Alex Karp calling Burry "bat -- -crazy" on CNBC.
Burry's bets are still off from how low he has prophesied they will go.
Shares of Nvidia, which remains the largest company market capitalizations, are trading about 5% lower than the day Burry announced his short. Palantir has fared worse, with shares down about 40%.
Burry and the companies he said he's shorting didn't return requests for comment.
Comments