# Hedge fund titans split hard on Nvidia in new 13F filings > Source: > Published: 2026-08-20 03:47:50+00:00 *Dan Loeb sold Nvidia while David Tepper bought more, and that split tells you the AI trade has moved into a harder phase. The stock can still win, but the easy argument around it has started to fray.* Nvidia doesn't usually invite this kind of disagreement from investors who made careers by being early and blunt. Not like this. The Q2 2026 13F filings, which show holdings as of June 30 and were filed in mid-August, put Dan Loeb's Third Point and David Tepper's Appaloosa on opposite sides of the same stock. That's unusual. Start with the cleanest fact. Loeb sold. According to Barron's, Third Point exited Nvidia, Broadcom, KLA, Lam Research, the VanEck Semiconductor ETF and Meta in the second quarter. The firm then built a new 20 million share position in Warner Bros. Discovery worth about $533 million, making WBD its largest disclosed U.S. stock holding at the end of June. GuruFocus put that WBD stake at 11.41% of Third Point's reported portfolio, while its filing analysis showed Alphabet rising from 175,000 shares to 1,025,000 shares. That isn't a small trim after a big run. It is a clean exit from several chip names that have carried the AI trade, paired with a very different kind of bet: a media company whose value case depends on assets, restructuring and deal logic rather than another quarter of GPU demand. You don't have to agree with Loeb to understand the message. He found a better use for the money. ## Loeb Moved On, Tepper Stayed In Tepper did the opposite. Appaloosa added 53,500 Nvidia shares in the same quarter, taking the position to 1,525,000 shares worth roughly $305 million, according to a Yahoo Finance summary of the fund's latest filing. It was not a dramatic new bet. It was a nudge higher on a position that was already meaningful. [Palladium Has Quietly Surged 90% and Russia Tariffs Could Push It Further](https://startupfortune.com/palladium-has-quietly-surged-90-and-russia-tariffs-could-push-it-further/) Palladium has surged almost 90% over the past year to trade near $1,348 an ounce, quietly outrunning gold and silver. Bank of America now targets $2,200 by the end of 2026, and pending U.S. tariffs of over 100% on Russian palladium could tighten the supply squeeze even further. - [palladium prices surge 90 percent in one year](https://startupfortune.com/palladium-has-quietly-surged-90-and-russia-tariffs-could-push-it-further/) - [Russia tariffs could push palladium prices higher soon](https://startupfortune.com/palladium-has-quietly-surged-90-and-russia-tariffs-could-push-it-further/) That changes the read. Tepper wasn't chasing Nvidia for the first time after the stock had already become the world's favorite AI proxy. Appaloosa's disclosed book still leaned hard into the same broad trade, with Amazon, Micron, Taiwan Semiconductor, Alphabet, Uber, Meta and Vistra all sitting above or near Nvidia in the portfolio rankings shown by 13F trackers. If you're buying Nvidia here, you're saying the demand curve still matters more than the valuation argument. This is not noise. 13F filings are delayed and incomplete. They are sometimes overread too, since they don't show shorts or most foreign holdings, and they don't show the thinking behind a trade either. Still, they are useful when the moves are this clean. One investor left Nvidia and bought Warner Bros. Discovery. Another bought more Nvidia while keeping a portfolio built around AI infrastructure, memory, cloud and power demand. Here is the limit. The filings tell you what changed by June 30, not what those funds own today. Nvidia shares have moved since then. Chip stocks have had a rougher summer. The next earnings report on August 26 will matter more than any old snapshot. But snapshots still show pressure points. This one shows that the AI trade is no longer being treated as one obvious answer by every smart investor in the room. ## The Competition Is Now Specific The harder part for Nvidia is that the bear case has become more concrete. AMD used its Advancing AI 2026 event in San Francisco on July 22 and 23 to push a full AI infrastructure roadmap, including Helios rack-scale systems, Instinct MI455X GPUs, EPYC Venice server CPUs and ROCm.AI software. AMD also highlighted partnerships with names that matter in this market, including Microsoft, Anthropic, Cerebras, AT&T and Cisco. Nvidia still leads. Frankly, pretending otherwise is silly. The company remains the central supplier for AI training and inference at scale, and Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya recently argued Nvidia could climb sharply from current levels, according to MarketWatch. Nvidia itself said on August 11 that it is working with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR on financing platforms designed to support more than $500 billion of AI infrastructure over time. The question is price. If AI spending keeps rising, Nvidia can keep proving the sellers wrong. If customers spread orders across AMD, custom silicon and new entrants, the stock has to carry more argument than it used to. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that big technology companies have more than $3 trillion in off-balance-sheet commitments tied largely to AI infrastructure, far above the roughly $600 billion in disclosed capital spending it examined. That is real demand, but it is also real strain. For you as an investor, the useful point is not that Loeb must be right or Tepper must be wrong. The useful point is that Nvidia has stopped being a simple consensus trade among the people whose filings everyone reads. Some are still paying for growth. Some are taking the win. The next leg depends less on belief in AI and more on whether revenue and margins keep justifying the price - and whether customer budgets keep coming through. [Mastercard's BVNK Deal Leaves Visa Scrambling for a New Stablecoin Partner](https://startupfortune.com/mastercards-bvnk-deal-leaves-visa-scrambling-for-a-new-stablecoin-partner/) Mastercard closed its up-to-$1.8 billion acquisition of BVNK on August 3, 2026, absorbing the stablecoin settlement partner Visa Direct had relied on since January. 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