The fear was simple. A SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX) listing would pull money out of the rest of the tech and AI trade, leaving chip stocks short of buyers.
Dan Ives at Wedbush thinks that fear has now been answered. He argues the weakness in chip stocks over the past week to 10 days reflected nerves ahead of the SpaceX debut, not a real crack in demand.
The listing came on Friday, and the rest of the sector held firm. Ives calls that a Goldilocks outcome.
The sell-off was about positioning, not fundamentals
His read is that investors crowded out of chips to make room for SpaceX, then watched the wider sector hold up once the deal landed.
That, to Ives, kills the bear case. He frames the sell-off fears as a rear-view mirror concern.
Recent Wedbush checks across Asia point to strong demand, which gives him confidence to own tech into the second half of 2026.
OpenAI and Anthropic are next in the queue
Ives reads the SpaceX reception as a signal for the two largest private AI companies.
He expects both OpenAI and Anthropic to move toward listings before the end of the year.
More capital flowing into these names feeds what he calls the AI flywheel, pulling fresh spending into chips, energy and infrastructure.
He sees the second and third order names, the firms that supply power and data centre capacity, as the longer-run beneficiaries.
He still puts the AI build-out in its third inning, with investors underrating the scale of the spending cycle to come.
The monetisation phase is the real story
Ives sees the next leg as monetisation rather than hype.
He thinks the market is underestimating how fast Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS can convert AI deal flow into cloud growth over the next year.
The message from chief information officers, he says, is that adoption is live and the hunt is on for department-level use cases to launch in the second half of 2026.
He sees no cracks in demand across chips, hardware or software.
Data, not models, decides the winners
The sharpest call sits at the data layer: Ives argues large language models will commoditise over the coming years, leaving company data as the deciding factor in enterprise AI.
That makes proprietary data both the main constraint and the route to revenue.
His four names on that layer are Palantir, Snowflake, Datadog and Innodata.
Wedbush rates all four outperform, with price targets of $230 on Palantir, $280 on Snowflake, $260 on Datadog and $120 on Innodata.
None of this is a forecast, and Wedbush flags macro weakness and rising competition as live risks to the call.
