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AI growth is just getting started, BlackRock’s thematic ETF head says

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AI Infrastructure Build-out

BlackRock expects infrastructure and cybersecurity plays to shine in 2025.

Jay Jacobs, the firm’s U.S. head of thematic and active ETFs, cites the artificial intelligence boom as a major catalyst.

“It’s still very early in the AI adoption cycle,” he told CNBC’s “ETF Edge” this week.

According to Jacobs, AI companies need to build out their data centers. Plus, keeping that data safe is also a sound investment play for the new year.

“If you think about your data, you want to spend more on cybersecurity as it gets more valuable,” he said. “We think this is really going to benefit the cybersecurity [and the] software community which is seeing very rapid revenue growth based off of this AI.”

Jacobs also sees a wider impact in terms of the supporting infrastructure.

“I think what people forget is kind of, magical as technology is, there’s real physical things on the ground that run that technology, whether it’s power, whether it’s data centers and real estate, whether it’s chips. It’s not just something that lives in the ether, in the cloud, there’s real physical things that have to happen, and that means energy, that means more materials like copper, that means more real estate. You really have to think about kind of the physical infrastructure that underlies it,” he added.

So, for Jacobs, the theme is widening one’s investment scope.

“It’s not just about megacap tech names. There’s other semiconductor companies, there’s other data center companies, there’s other software companies that are benefiting from the rise of this theme,” he said.

Jacobs cited BlackRock’s iShares Future AI & Tech ETF (ARTY) and iShares AI Innovation and Tech Active ETF (BAI) as potential ways to benefit from the rise in AI. The iShares Future AI & Tech ETF is up around 13% for the year so far, while the iShares AI Innovation and Tech Active ETF is up around 13% since its Oct. 21 launch as of Friday’s close.

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DeepSeek AI excitement spills over to Hong Kong’s IPO market

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The Exchange Square Complex, which houses the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, on Feb. 26, 2025.

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

BEIJING — Chinese companies are jumping at a window of opportunity to go public in Hong Kong as global investors start to return to the region, following the news of DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence breakthrough in late January.

It’s a level of excitement that has not been felt for more than three years, despite the overhang of U.S. trade tensions. Initial public offerings are a lucrative way for early investors in startups to exit and reap a return.

“Everyone is working so perfectly together. IPO candidates, the investor and the regulators,” said George Chan, global IPO leader at EY. “All these three parties are working so perfectly at this moment to actually cultivate a healthy Hong Kong IPO market.”

“The U.S. long-term fund has returned. It shows investors are getting more confident [about] China,” he said, adding that post-IPO performance has also been encouraging.

Chinese bubble tea giant Mixue went public on March 3 in a highly oversubscribed Hong Kong listing. And in a sign of more to come, Chinese battery giant Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL) filed in February for what could be Hong Kong’s largest IPO since 2021, when short-video company Kuaishou listed.

Still think it is a little risky to bet on specific companies or industries in China: GAO Capital

News of China-based DeepSeek’s claims to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT in reasoning capabilities at a lower cost — despite U.S. restrictions on Chinese access to advanced chips for training AI models — hit global tech stocks in late January, while spurring a rally in China. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index surged to three-year highs.

Chinese President Xi Jinping also held a rare meeting with tech entrepreneurs in February, and Beijing has signaled greater support for the private sector, after taking a more restrictive stance in recent years.

Six initial public offerings in Hong Kong raised more than 1 billion Hong Kong dollars ($130 million) in the first quarter — a jump from just one listing of that size in the year-ago period — according to KPMG.

In all, the consultancy said, Hong Kong saw 15 IPOs in all of the first quarter which raised 17.7 billion HKD — the best start to a year since 2021.

There’s still a long way to go before recovering to that level. Hong Kong saw 32 IPOs in the first quarter of 2021 that raised a whopping 132.7 billion HKD, according to KPMG.

The Hong Kong stock exchange has adjusted its listing rules in the interim, including ones that support companies already listed in mainland China to offer shares in Hong Kong.

In addition to CATL, other companies listed in mainland China — Hengrui Pharmaceuticals, Mabwell, Haitian Flavoring and Food, Fortior Tech and Sanhua Intelligent Controls — are “actively seeking Hong Kong listings,” said Tiger Brokers, an underwriter of many Chinese companies’ IPOs in the U.S. and Hong Kong.

“Chinese regulators are encouraging companies to list in Hong Kong to broaden financing channels and support the outbound merger and acquisition needs of Chinese enterprises,” the firm said.

Still not out of the woods

Back in the summer of 2021, the fallout over Chinese ride-hailing company Didi’s IPO in the U.S. prompted both countries’ regulators to scrutinize what was then a wave of Chinese companies listing in New York.

The major issues have since been resolved and Beijing has clarified rules for Chinese companies wanting to list outside the mainland. But the Trump administration indicated in its “America First Investment Policy” that it could increase scrutiny on U.S. capital flowing to China, on top of heightened tariffs.

The U.S. and China have yet to indicate when their two leaders might meet in an attempt to forge a deal. A surge of interest in AI and tech are also not yet enough to speed up a recovery in China’s economy.

“At this point in time, all we can see is the good indicators,” EY’s Chan said. But “there could be one single incident happening which could pretty much reverse the trend.”

“Things tend to have a pattern,” he said. “If things can keep on for three months, four months, it will likely continue for the rest of the year.”

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Treasury Secretary Bessent says market woes are more about tech stock sell-off than Trump’s tariffs

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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent speaks to reporters outside the West Wing after doing a television interview on the North Lawn of the White House on March 13, 2025 in Washington, DC. 

Andrew Harnik | Getty Images

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Wednesday the sell-off in the stock market is due more to a sharp pullback in the biggest technology stocks instead of the protectionist policies coming from the Trump administration.

“I’m trying to be Secretary of Treasury, not a market commentator. What I would point out is that especially the Nasdaq peaked on DeepSeek day so that’s a Mag 7 problem, not a MAGA problem,” Bessent said on Bloomberg TV Wednesday evening.

Bessent was referring to Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, whose new language models sparked a rout in U.S. technology stocks in late January. The emergence of DeepSeek’s highly competitive and potentially much cheaper models stoked doubts about the billions that the big U.S. tech companies are spending on AI.

The so-called Magnificent 7 stocks — Apple, Amazon, Tesla, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Nvidia — started selling off drastically, pulling the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite into correction territory. The tech-heavy benchmark is down about 13% from its record high reached on December 16.

However, the secretary downplayed the impact from President Donald Trump’s steep tariffs, which caught many investors off guard and fueled fears of a re-acceleration in inflation, slower economic growth and even a recession. Many investors have blamed the tariff rollout for driving the S&P 500 briefly into correction territory from its record reached in late February. Wall Street defines a correction as a drop of 10% from a recent high.

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S&P 500, YTD

Trump signed an aggressive “reciprocal tariff” policy at the White House Wednesday evening, slapping duties of at least 10% and even higher for some countries. The actions sparked a huge sell-off in the stock market overnight, with the S&P 500 futures declining nearly 4% and the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average shedding 1,100 points. The losses will likely but the S&P 500 back into correction territory in Thursday’s session.

“It’s going to be fine if we put the best economic conditions in place,” Bessent said in a separate interview on Fox Wednesday evening. “If you go back and look, the stock market actually peaked on the [DeepSeek] Chinese AI announcement. So a lot of what we have seen has been just an idiosyncratic tech sell-off.”

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Conservative cable channel Newsmax shares plunge more than 70% after a dizzying 2-day surge

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A Newsmax booth broadcasts as attendees try out the guns on display at the National Rifle Association (NRA) annual convention in Houston, Texas, U.S. May 29, 2022. 

Callaghan O’hare | Reuters

Shares of conservative news channel Newsmax plunged more than 70% on Wednesday as its meteoric rise as a new public company proved to be short-lived.

The stock tumbled a whopping 72% in afternoon trading, following a 2,230% surge in Newsmax’s first two days of trading after debuting on the New York Stock Exchange. At one point, the rally gave the company a market capitalization of nearly $30 billion — surpassing the market cap of legacy media companies like Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox Corp.

Newsmax was listed on the NYSE via a so-called Regulation A offering, instead of a traditional IPO. Such an offering allows small companies to raise capital without undergoing the full SEC registration process. The primary focus is to sell to retail investors, in this case It was sold to approximately 30,000 retail investors. 

The public offering indeed garnered the attention from retail traders, some of whom touted the stock as the “New GME” in online chatrooms. GME refers to the meme stock GameStop, which made Wall Street history in 2021 by its speculative trading boom.

Newsmax has a small “float,” or shares available for trading. Less than 6% of Newsmax shares, or 7.5 million shares out of a total of 128 million fully diluted shares, are available for public trading.

The conservative TV news outlet has seen its ratings rise with the election of President Donald Trump and other prominent Republicans — although it still falls behind the dominant Fox News. Overall, Newsmax ranks in the top 20 among cable network average viewership in both prime time and daytime, Nielsen said.

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