D E Shaw & Company 13F Portfolio

Rising conviction is clustered in three buckets: hyperscaler/platform winners from AI, second-wave semis and optics, and good old-fashioned U.S. credit and consumption.

On the platform side, they leaned harder into the AI demand aggregators rather than just the chip suppliers. Alphabet (both GOOGL and GOOG) and Meta all saw material adds, with Meta’s stake boosted +80.1% despite only modest gains versus cost. Nvidia remains the central silicon expression, with value up to $4.01B and shares up +36.3%, signaling they see more upside even after a +71.9% gain vs average buy.

Second-wave AI enablers are where the real size-up is happening:

• Marvell, a key networking/accelerator name, saw shares explode +657.8%, lifting the stake to $746.1M.
• Coherent, levered to optics and lasers, was scaled by +1360.1%, now a $648.0M position.
• Lumentum, another optical player, was multiplied by +4669.5% to $573.2M.

Outside pure tech, the fund is clearly betting that U.S. consumers and media ad dollars hold up. Amazon shares are up +131.4%, Home Depot +14.8%, Sherwin-Williams +41.3%, and Warner Bros Discovery +173.7% to $1.09B — a very pointed view that housing-adjacent spend and streaming/advertising cash flows still have room to recover.

The biggest source of cash this quarter is profit-taking in the most cyclical and over-earning parts of the AI stack. Micron was cut hard, with shares down -79.0% and an estimated -$3.34B reduction, despite sitting +646.9% above average cost. Western Digital (-29.3%), SanDisk (-52.1%), and Intel (-50.5%) tell the same story: crystallize enormous gains in memory and storage before the cycle turns.

Broadcom was also aggressively downsized, with shares off -58.3% and roughly $1.44B of value taken off the table, even as the position is still nicely in the green. This is not about stock-specific fear; it’s about position sizing in names that have already had a huge AI rerating.

They also trimmed the mega-cap software franchise risk: Microsoft shares were reduced -42.2%, Apple -19.8%. In health care, they shaved Eli Lilly (-22.1%) and 3M (-7.9%), and in payments they cut American Express (-20.3%). None of these look like broken theses; they look like funding sources to pay for outsized adds in Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, Marvell, Coherent, and the giant SPY and Berkshire moves.

Sector data confirms that the headline story is de-risking from a hyper-concentrated tech book rather than abandoning growth. Technology exposure fell from an estimated 62.05% to 43.12%, yet within that smaller slice they are upgrading quality and time horizon — more Nvidia, Alphabet, Meta, Marvell, Fortinet, Intuit, less Micron, Broadcom, Intel, and legacy storage.

The biggest “sector” gainer is the unclassified bucket, from 1.54% to 17.76%, driven by SPY and Berkshire. That is effectively a massive increase in diversified U.S. equity beta in place of idiosyncratic cyclicals. Financials ticked up from 5.11% to 6.39% as they doubled down on U.S. financial infrastructure: Capital One (+93.8% shares), Wells Fargo (+282.3%), Schwab (+120.9%), and ICE (+107.9%), while modestly trimming American Express.

Consumer-facing names saw a clear build, with Consumer Discretionary up from 8.82% to 11.28%. Adds to Amazon, Home Depot, Sherwin-Williams, Sysco, and Warner Bros Discovery line up with a thesis that real-world spending and advertising/streaming budgets should hold, even if the AI trade cools at the margin. Smaller shifts — modest reductions in Health Care and Utilities, flat-ish Energy — suggest they’re not trying to time macro, just rebalance around their core AI-plus-U.S.-growth view.

Taken together, this quarter reads as a risk-management upgrade, not a change of religion. D E Shaw is still structurally long AI and U.S. growth, but with less reliance on the most volatile parts of the semiconductor cycle and more on diversified beta, platforms, and real-economy beneficiaries.

The huge SPY build and Berkshire add give them room to stay invested even if single-name volatility spikes, while still capturing the broad earnings power of U.S. corporates. The rotation inside tech — away from memory/storage and broad megacap software, toward Nvidia, Alphabet, Marvell, Coherent, Fortinet, and Intuit — suggests they see the next leg of AI returns accruing to compute, networking, security, and software monetization rather than just raw capacity build-out.

Beefed-up positions in banks, brokers, and payment rails indicate confidence that credit quality and transaction volumes remain resilient, and that higher-for-longer rates are a net positive for well-capitalized financials. Meanwhile, consumer and media adds (Amazon, Home Depot, Sherwin-Williams, Warner Bros Discovery, Sysco) imply they are not buying the hard-landing narrative. If the AI capex boom bleeds into broader nominal growth, this portfolio is set up to participate — but with a lot more ballast than it had a quarter ago.