David Tepper’s $6.9B Appaloosa Trims China and Triples Micron in AI Semis Pivot

Appaloosa LP, the hedge fund run by Carolina Panthers owner and former Goldman Sachs trader David Tepper, disclosed a $6.93 billion equity portfolio in its February 13F filing, built around one trade: rotate out of Chinese tech and into US AI semiconductors.

On February 17, 2026, Appaloosa LP filed its quarterly 13F-HR (the SEC form U.S. institutional managers use to disclose their stock holdings 45 days after each quarter end) reporting $6.93 billion in equity positions across 38 issuers as of December 31, 2025. The fund, run by David Tepper, the 68-year-old former Goldman Sachs junk-bond trader who founded Appaloosa in 1993 and now also owns the Carolina Panthers, traded out of Chinese tech and into US AI hardware in a single quarter.

The trade is the inverse of the Aschenbrenner playbook. Where Situational Awareness owns the picks-and-shovels of AI compute, Appaloosa now owns the AI mega-caps plus the memory chips those mega-caps buy by the trainload. Tepper trimmed Alibaba by a fifth, sold out of his entire regional-bank book, and put the cash into Micron, Meta, Alphabet, and a new South Korea ETF. The bet is that US AI capital spending lands in semiconductor revenue and platform earnings before any Chinese stimulus does.

From $7.4B to $6.9B as Tepper Sells the Bank Book

Appaloosa entered Q4 2025 with $7.38 billion in disclosed equities and exited with $6.93 billion, a 6 percent contraction. The drop is not a market mark-down. It is a deliberate book trim. Tepper sold out of nine positions worth roughly $440 million combined, including six regional banks (KeyCorp, Truist, Citizens Financial, Comerica, Western Alliance, Zions) plus Block, Caesars Entertainment, and Fiserv. He used the proceeds to triple the Micron stake, expand Meta by 62 percent, and lift Alphabet by 29 percent. At $6.93 billion, the disclosed book sits roughly half the size of Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square and somewhat above Brad Gerstner’s Altimeter Capital. The shape, however, looks nothing like either: 38 issuers spread across China tech, US AI mega-caps, semiconductors, airlines, and one-off macro names like Whirlpool and Deutsche Bank.

The Top 5 Positions and the Thesis Behind Them

Five names account for roughly 39 percent of the portfolio. Alibaba is still the largest at $753 million, even after Tepper sold 1.31 million ADR (American Depositary Receipts, the US-listed shares of foreign-listed companies) shares in the quarter. The Chinese e-commerce and cloud platform remains his anchor on the China-recovery trade he has been talking about on CNBC since September 2024. Alphabet Class C is second at $561 million after a 29 percent share-count expansion, the position the fund built into the Gemini and Google Cloud earnings stretch. Amazon is third at $503 million, modestly trimmed from Q3 by 13 percent on shares but still a top stake on the Amazon Web Services capacity build. Micron is fourth at $499 million, combining $428 million of common stock plus a $71 million call option position (call options are contracts that give the right to buy shares at a set price, and the $71 million figure here is notional exposure, the dollar value of the underlying stock the options control, not the premium paid). The stake tripled in shares and the call leg is brand new, the most aggressive single move of the quarter. Meta is fifth at $396 million after Tepper raised the share count 62 percent. The unifying thesis: US AI capital spending lands in memory chips and ad-supported platform earnings first, with Chinese tech kept as a cheap-multiple hedge that Tepper trims as conviction in the China-stimulus trade fades.

Why This 13F Is Trending Now

The filing was published in February. The conversation has not stopped because the rotation it discloses is happening in real time. Micron is up roughly 75 percent year-to-date as memory pricing climbs on AI training demand. Meta and Alphabet have ridden Q1 advertising earnings beats. Alibaba has chopped sideways while US-China tariff headlines reset. The Tepper sequence, hike China conviction in late 2024, then trim it through Q4 2025, has become the textbook case for retail and pro investors trying to time the China tech stretch. CNBC, Yahoo Finance, and Motley Fool have published walk-throughs of the 13F as a referendum on whether the China-stimulus trade is over for now.

What to Watch

The May 15 deadline: The next 13F-HR, covering March 31, 2026, is due in 10 days. The numbers to watch are whether Tepper kept Alibaba above 5 million ADR shares, whether the Micron call options were rolled or exercised into stock, and whether any new mega-cap technology name appeared on the book.

Call option mechanics: The new $71 million Micron call leg adds notional exposure to memory pricing without paying for the full common stock. If Q1 disclosures show the call position rolled higher in strike or expanded in size, Tepper is doubling the AI-memory bet. If the calls vanished, he took the gain.

The China stimulus and trade-war variable: The Chinese-tech side of the book is the read on whether Tepper still believes in the late-2024 stimulus thesis. If Q1 trims push Alibaba below 4 million shares or fully exit the Chinese-internet ETFs, the rotation is complete and the book becomes a clean US AI bet.