Every few months someone declares the AI party over. The music is stopping, the punch bowl is being taken away, the capex checks are about to get smaller. And every few months, someone who actually owns the stocks says: not so fast.
This time that someone is Hendi Susanto, a portfolio manager at Gabelli Funds. His argument, as reported by MarketWatch, goes like this: even if the biggest AI labs, the Anthropic and OpenAI types, decide to pump the brakes on development, that does not mean the infrastructure spending stops. It just means the baton gets passed.
"Second- and third-tier players" will jump at the chance to catch up, Susanto said, and that keeps demand for AI infrastructure running hot. He also pointed to growth catalysts still sitting on the horizon: inference, enterprise AI, and physical AI. And he noted that the top AI-infrastructure firms have signaled demand is likely to outstrip supply at least until next year.
Here is the part that matters for anyone who has watched semiconductor stocks trade like a roller coaster. Yes, chip and chip-equipment names are traditionally cyclical. But Susanto's counter is simple: building and scaling new capacity takes years, not quarters. That mismatch between how long it takes to build and how fast demand shows up should keep the AI trade propped up.
He also flagged something you do not usually see at the top of a cycle. Customers are signing multi-year supply agreements for chips, networking equipment and other hardware. That is not the behavior of buyers who think a glut is coming.
"That's not what the front end of a downturn looks like," he said.
Which means Susanto sees selloffs in semiconductor stocks as opportunities rather than warnings. He is especially interested in the higher-risk, higher-reward corners of the AI trade, like next-generation optical connectivity. Those are the spots where the swings are wildest, and he knows it.
"That's why volatility and speculation there are so elevated," he said.
