Assenagon Asset Management S.A. 13F Portfolio

The largest dollar adds tell a clear story: Assenagon thinks the next phase of AI returns accrues to the semiconductor supply chain and to the firms monetizing AI productivity, not just to the hyperscalers that marketed the narrative.

• NVIDIA: Already the largest position at 6.84%, they still lifted exposure by +28.6%, adding about $1.17B. With the stake showing a 76.1% gain vs their average buy, this is not “buying the dip”; it’s doubling (figuratively) into entrenched dominance of AI compute.
• SANDISK (Micron takeover stub): A new $1.41B position at 1.84% weight, initiated while it sits about -10.9% below their average entry, says they are comfortable underwriting near-term volatility to own memory capacity and storage in the AI buildout.
• Intel and Taiwan Semiconductor: Intel is up +45.5% in shares (roughly +$705.6M), with a 115.1% gain vs cost, and TSM is a fresh $490.5M line. Together with big adds in Broadcom, Texas Instruments and ON Semiconductor, this is a bet that the breadth of AI hardware demand is still mispriced.
• Alphabet (GOOGL), Synopsys, KLA and Palo Alto Networks: Doubling GOOGL (+107.4% shares) while trimming GOOG, ramping Synopsys +39.5% and KLA almost tenfold, plus a +93.5% add in Palo Alto, is textbook: pay up for tools (EDA, process control, cybersecurity) that tax every incremental dollar of AI and cloud capex.
• Defensive ballast: UBS (+6277.5% shares, +$808.4M), Royal Bank of Canada, PepsiCo (+952.6%) and Walmart (+207.2%) show a willingness to recycle AI and biotech gains into large, liquid franchises that benefit from higher nominal growth and consumer resilience.

In short, the “adds” list is a map: semis and tooling at the core, banks and staples as the carry, with Berkshire Hathaway also growing +45.1% as an all-weather allocator embedded in the book.

Funding for all those hardware, bank, and staple adds came from three pockets: marquee software/platform winners, over-extended health-care momentum, and some early-cycle AI beneficiaries.

• Mega-cap platforms: Microsoft is cut -23.5% (about -$1.19B), Amazon -13.1% (-$641.0M), Alphabet’s GOOG line -11.4% (-$361.7M), Apple -6.8% (-$327.8M), and Meta -28.2%. Each of these sits on sizable gains vs average cost; this looks like deliberate profit-taking, not a repudiation. They are reallocating from broad, richly valued AI narratives to more targeted enablers.
• High-flyer health care: Eli Lilly is the single biggest dollar trim, down -67.7% (-$1.26B) despite a 29.9% gain vs cost. Intuitive Surgical is cut -42.7% (-$296.3M), while Abbott is trimmed -27.3%. The message: GLP-1 glamour and premium med-tech have moved from mispriced growth to expensive optionality; capital is better used diversifying across pipelines.
• Cyclical and early AI infrastructure: Applied Materials sees a -69.0% slash (-$855.5M), even though their position is up 175.2% vs cost. Tesla is down -16.7% (-$277.1M), Netflix -31.6%, and smaller trims hit Marvell and PNC. They’re reducing exposure to more cyclical or sentiment-heavy AI and consumer names after a strong run.

The pattern across these sells is consistent: harvest liquidity where multiples expanded fastest and fundamentals are well understood, and recycle into less-crowded names and into balance-sheet ballast. Assenagon isn’t abandoning growth; it’s refusing to let it dominate risk budget unchecked.

On the surface, sector weights barely budge: Technology edges down from an estimated 63.62% to 62.14% and Consumer Discretionary from 15.85% to 14.06%. But under the hood, the composition of risk changes meaningfully.

Technology remains the spine, yet it is more diversified within the stack. There’s a clear migration inside tech from application/software champions toward semis, EDA, and equipment — NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, TSM, KLA, Texas Instruments, ON, and Broadcom together absorb much of what was freed up from Microsoft, GOOG, and AMAT. That’s a shift from AI “landlords” to the suppliers of compute, memory, networking, and security.

Outside tech, the rotation is visible. Finance jumps from 0.83% to 2.94% on outsized additions to UBS and Royal Bank of Canada; Real-Economy Payments (Mastercard) and Uber, though misfiled as Real Estate, push that bucket to 1.53%. Telecommunications more than doubles from 0.65% to 1.36% via Arista and T-Mobile, both critical to bandwidth and 5G data flows. Consumer Staples climbs from 0.11% to 1.03% with the PepsiCo build, and Unclassified (Berkshire, GE Vernova) grows from 3.02% to 3.97%.

Health Care drops from 11.34% to 10.15%, but that masks a quality upgrade: big cuts in Lilly and Intuitive Surgical are offset by heavier weights in diversified pharma like Merck (+263.7% shares), Gilead (+346.5%), Pfizer (+96.0%), AbbVie (+55.5%), Johnson & Johnson (+87.0%), and AstraZeneca (+45.5%). The book is less a pure momentum play on one drug class and more a broad call on cash-generative pipelines.

Taken together, this quarter’s moves paint Assenagon as a manager that still believes the AI and digital-infrastructure trade has legs, but no longer trusts a narrow set of mega-caps and momentum health-care names to carry that thesis alone.

On the positive-risk side, they seem to be betting that: (1) AI hardware demand will stay stronger for longer, benefitting a wider ring of semis, memory and equipment makers; (2) software and tools that sit on top of that capex — Synopsys, KLA, Palo Alto, Alphabet’s ad and cloud stack — will keep compounding; and (3) network and telecom infrastructure (Arista, T-Mobile) remains underappreciated as data intensity explodes.

On the defensive side, they are building a more macro-resilient frame: large banks in UBS and Royal Bank of Canada as beneficiaries of healthier net interest margins and capital markets; consumer staples like PepsiCo and household names like Walmart and Procter & Gamble as hedges against real-income volatility; and a rebalanced pharma basket that is less dependent on one or two blockbuster narratives. Berkshire and GE Vernova add an industrial and capital-allocation overlay that can quietly compound alongside the high-beta core.

If the AI tide keeps rising, this portfolio is structured to participate via the less-glamorous but highly profitable guts of the ecosystem. If sentiment sours or policy/rate shocks hit, the expanded sleeves in banks, staples, diversified pharma and Berkshire should blunt the impact. Future quarters will show whether they push this de-risking further, but for now, Assenagon looks like an AI believer intent on surviving the full cycle, not just the hype phase.