Lee Ainslie’s $9.3B Maverick Capital Exits AMD and Pivots Into AI Chip Equipment

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The Market Context in 60 Seconds

01 Maverick Capital Ltd, the Dallas-based hedge fund run by Tiger Cub Lee Ainslie, shows a $9.32 billion equity portfolio per its February 13F filing, built around one bet: the AI chip equipment makers will earn the next leg of the AI capital cycle.
02 The portfolio grew from $7.48 billion to $9.32 billion in three months, up 25 percent, while the name count was cut from 203 issuers to 179.
03 The top 5 stakes hold about 27 percent of the portfolio: Nvidia at $557 million, Microsoft at $556 million, Amazon at $550 million, Taiwan Semiconductor at $504 million, and Alphabet at $358 million.
04 The pivot is mechanical: full exit of Advanced Micro Devices, a brand-new $291 million Applied Materials stake, a $108 million Lam Research rebuild from a residual, and a 51 percent ASML build inside one quarter.
05 The Q1 2026 13F is due by Friday, May 15, 2026, and will show whether Ainslie pressed the AMAT and LRCX builds further or stabilized the AI semis stack after the Q4 setup.

The Top Positions and How They Changed

#	Position	What they do	Sept 2025	Dec 2025	Change
1	Alphabet NEW	Owns Google, YouTube, and Google Cloud (new Class C build, replacing a tiny Class A residual)	$0	$358M	NEW
2	Applied Materials NEW	Sells the deposition and etch machines that build computer chips	$0	$291M	NEW
3	Boston Scientific NEW	Makes cardiac stents, pacemakers, and ablation catheters	$0	$281M	NEW
4	Taiwan Semiconductor	Builds the chips for Nvidia, Apple, and AMD	$285M	$504M	+77%
5	ASML	Sells the EUV machines that print every leading-edge AI chip	$184M	$279M	+51%
6	Nvidia	Designs the GPUs hyperscalers buy in the tens of billions	$400M	$557M	+39%
7	Capital One	Issues credit cards and runs the Discover platform after the 2025 merger	$230M	$314M	+36%
8	Philip Morris	Sells Marlboro and the IQOS heated-tobacco device	$263M	$349M	+33%
9	Microsoft	Runs Azure cloud and the OpenAI partnership	$483M	$556M	+15%
10	Union Pacific	Largest U.S. freight railroad in the pending Norfolk Southern merger	$264M	$304M	+15%
11	Amazon	Runs AWS, the largest cloud provider	$491M	$550M	+12%

On February 13, 2026, Maverick Capital Ltd 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 $9.32 billion in equity stakes across 179 names as of December 31, 2025. The fund, founded by Lee Ainslie in 1993 after he trained under Julian Robertson at Tiger Management, is one of the original Tiger Cubs. The portfolio reads like a single rotation: out of the fabless GPU rival, into the chip equipment makers that supply every leading-edge fab.

That trade is the picks-and-shovels of the picks-and-shovels of artificial intelligence. Nvidia designs the GPU compute (the specialized chips AI training runs on). But Nvidia cannot make a single chip without Taiwan Semiconductor. And Taiwan Semiconductor cannot build a new fab without the chip-making machines that come from ASML, Applied Materials, and Lam Research. Maverick is betting the supplier layer captures margin every time hyperscalers (Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Meta and a handful of frontier-AI labs) order another round of chips.

From $7.48B to $9.32B in Three Months

Maverick’s portfolio grew 25 percent in three months, from $7.48 billion as of September 30, 2025 to $9.32 billion as of December 31, 2025. The growth came from new buying across the top of the fund. Taiwan Semiconductor shares rose 63 percent and Nvidia shares rose 39 percent in the same window. Maverick cut its name count from 203 issuers to 179, moving capital into the top of the book and exiting a long tail of smaller bets. At $9.32 billion, the fund is sized between Daniel Loeb’s Third Point at $7.27 billion and Stephen Mandel’s Lone Pine Capital at $13.61 billion. Lone Pine and Coatue, both Tiger Cubs peers, ran the same AI semis trade in the same quarter.

What to Watch

The May 15 deadline: Maverick’s Q1 2026 13F-HR is due by Friday, May 15, 2026 and will reveal whether the Applied Materials and Lam Research builds were extended into Q1 or whether Ainslie sat on the Q4 stack while prices ran.

The AMD question: Whether Ainslie left Advanced Micro Devices at zero in Q1 2026 or rebuilt the stake as the OpenAI-AMD chip deal news cycle peaked in late January and February 2026.

The supplier-layer thesis: Watch hyperscaler 2026 capex commentary and Taiwan Semiconductor monthly revenue reports. The trade keeps working as long as AI capex stays elevated and Taiwan Semiconductor passes through orders to its equipment vendors.

Verified as of May 13, 2026.