This Billionaire Tech Investor Is Betting Big on SpaceX and Chip Stocks

Billionaire tech investor Philippe Laffont of Coatue Management was busy adding stocks to his portfolio in the second quarter. According to the 13F form filed on Aug. 14, the largest new addition was Space Exploration Technologies (NASDAQ: SPCX), although that likely stemmed from pre-IPO investments. Meanwhile, he aggressively bought a few semiconductor stocks in the quarter, including Micron (NASDAQ: MU), Cerebras (NASDAQ: CBRS), and Intel (NASDAQ: INTC).

Investing alongside billionaire investors can sometimes be a smart strategy, but should retail investors follow Laffont into those stocks?

Image source: The Motley Fool.

SpaceX

Like most large fund managers, Laffont likely acquired his SpaceX shares in the private market at valuations much lower than the stock's IPO price or its current trading level. However, based on interviews, it does not appear he plans to exit the position anytime soon, despite likely carrying a large gain.

Laffont has said it's easy to dismiss SpaceX as overvalued, and while he doesn't know what the company should be worth today, he thinks space is going to be a huge opportunity over the next 10 to 15 years. However, color me skeptical. I don't really want to invest in a company when there's no good way to value it except based on its 10- to 15-year potential. While the pace of technological innovation is picking up, there are still many technological hurdles the company will need to overcome. Those issues are enough to keep me on the sidelines.

Micron

After adding a small amount of Micron shares to his portfolio in Q1, Laffont dramatically increased the number of shares in his position by almost 19-fold in Q2. While Laffont didn't catch the memory trade early in the up cycle, it appears he is betting that it is here to stay.

This makes sense in my view. Between the finite number of EUV (extreme ultraviolet) lithography machines that ASML can produce, the fact that high bandwidth memory (HBM) uses upward of three times the wafer capacity of ordinary DRAM (dynamic random access memory), the constraints on advanced chip packaging capacity, and the time it takes to build new clean rooms for chip production, it looks like memory makers will not be able to boost their output by enough to catch up with surging demand for quite some time.

Micron stock is trading at a cheap forward P/E ratio of just above 6.5, and the memory supercycle looks as if it has legs. I like the stock here.

Intel

Intel's stock has been on a huge run over the past year, so Laffont is getting to this party late as well. While Intel largely missed out on benefiting from the initial artificial intelligence boom, its revenue has finally started to climb as demand for server central processing units (CPUs) surges due to the expected growth of agentic AI.

While data centers built in recent years for AI model training were outfitted with around 8 GPUs to 1 CPU, in servers that will handle agentic AI, the required GPU-to-CPU ratio is 1 to 1.

Because of that, there has been a steep increase in demand for data center CPUs. However, Intel has been losing market share in this space to Advanced Micro Devices, and Arm Holdings is also making a big push. At the same time, Intel's foundry business continues to bleed cash. Now that its valuation has gone from cheap to expensive over the past year, I wouldn't be chasing Intel stock.

Cerebras

Cerebras is a third semiconductor stock that Laffont was aggressively buying in Q2. While it's a more speculative investment, this is a stock I can get behind. The company's wafer-scale engines are unique, but with large quantities of SRAM (static random-access memory) directly embedded in them, they can offer superior inference performance, albeit at a premium price.

The company has already shown it may become an important player in the high end of the inference market. It has a large deal with OpenAI, and it is powering the Ultrafast mode of its new GPT-5.6 Sol model. At the same time, a recent partnership with AMD, whose Helios system can provide a more cost-effective solution for the pre-fill phase of inference, could also help Cerebras break into the mainstream segment of the inference market. That makes the company an intriguing potential long-term winner in a huge and fast-growing market.

Geoffrey Seiler has positions in Advanced Micro Devices. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends ASML, Advanced Micro Devices, Arm Holdings, Intel, and Micron Technology. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.