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By Jules Rimmer

Wood wants to disabuse investors of the notion that innovation and interest rates are inversely correlated.

Cathie Wood says interest rate hikes will take the steam out of the market.

Cathie Wood is a firm believer that the economy is on the precipice of a technological revolution. At some point next year, though, she warns, interest rates will reverse and that is going to prompt a “shudder throughout the market” and a reality check on AI valuations.

As the chief executive officer of Ark Invest, the $20 billion investment management firm based St. Petersburg, Florida, Wood has been a high-profile disciple of disruptive technologies since she established her company just over a decade ago. Interviewed by CNBC while attending the Saudi Future Investment Initiative conference in Riyadh, Wood does not think there’s an AI bubble and reckons in the long term, valuations will be justified.

She does, however, foresee a problem at some stage next year when the narrative around interest rates shifts from them falling to rising.

That’s considerably different than market expectations the Fed’s interest rates will be in a range between 2.75% and 3% at the end of next year.

Wood wants to check the misconception that “innovation and interest rates are inversely correlated.” “That is not true over history,” she says.

For Wood, though, whose signature exchange-traded fund, ARK Innovation ETF ARKK , has rallied about 58% so far in 2025, the increase in rates “will come for good reasons” owing to better growth. Wood paid tribute to the Trump administration’s initiatives in the technology sphere with the crypto and AI czar, boosting sentiment and innovation.

She also applauded the One Big Beautiful Bill Act for its success in encouraging deregulation, as well as the tax cuts which she thinks will see the overall effective tax rate for American corporates fall to approximately 10%. Specific changes in accounting, allowing for much more rapid depreciation, will boost innovation in the tech sector even further.

Wood is most enthusiastic about plays on robotics, AI, energy storage, blockchain technology and multiomic sequencing in healthcare, a means of gaining a more comprehensive understanding of complex biology in health and disease using genomics, proteomics and so on. She does caution investors that larger corporations will take time to adopt and incorporate AI operationally within their organizations.

In the past week or so, ARK Invest ETFs made made significant divestments in Palantir (PLTR), Shopify (SHOP) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) while making purchases in China tech stocks like Alibaba (BABA) (recently making ambitious investments into AI) and Baidu (BIDU).

-Jules Rimmer

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  10-28-25 0544ET
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We recently published 10 Buzzing News to Watch as Investors Look for Best AI Stocks Amid Fed Rate Cuts. NVIDIA Corp (NASDAQ:NVDA) is one of the best AI stocks amid Fed rate cuts.

Gene Munster, Deepwater Asset Management managing partner, recently talked about NVIDIA Corp (NASDAQ:NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang’s latest interview on CNBC and said he was encouraged by the executive’s comments about AI demand and opportunities. Answering a question about concerns related to debt and new deals in the AI space, Munster said companies are not running out of organic capital and investors still believe in the core growth story of AI.

“My sense is we’re not running out of organic capital. I think that, yes, this debt piece is something that’s new. But just to give a sense, at Deep Water, we invest in both public and private companies and invested recently in this OpenAI tender offer. That was incredibly difficult—the amount of demand outstripped the supply by probably a 2x factor. X goes and raises. I mean, nice endorsement that Jensen gave to Elon in the interview, and they’re going to be able to raise. I think that the capital is ultimately there.

Nvidia owns about 90% of the GPU market, which is expected to reach $3 to $4 trillion by 2030, according to Jensen Huang. McKinsey sees data center CapEx hitting $6.7 trillion with no slowdown in sight in the short term. Nvidia’s next-generation GPU series Rubin is coming in 2026, and the company also has a software edge in AI computing with its CUDA platform, which is now the de facto standard for AI programming.

Nvidia’s Hopper Infrastructure and now Blackwell form the core of AI infrastructure for LLM training and inference. But Nvidia’s growth is slowing compared to previous quarters amid competition and capex spending limitations from major companies. In the recently reported quarter, Nvidia’s annual revenue growth came in at 56%, compared with nearly 100% YoY growth in the past.

Mar Vista U.S. Quality Premier Strategy stated the following regarding NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) in its third quarter 2025 investor letter:

“NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) continues to benefit from the AI infrastructure build-out as hyperscale technology companies race toward artificial general intelligence. Demand for the company’s next-generation Blackwell platform remains strong, driven by the increasing complexity of large language models and the rise of reasoning-based applications. As CEO Jensen Huang has highlighted, reasoning tasks can require up to ten times more compute power than training a conventional large language model. With the AI market still in the early stages of a multi-year investment cycle, NVIDIA is well positioned to capture substantial value as the industry standard in accelerated computing.”