Two Managers Pitch AI Infrastructure Plays at Sohn New York 2026

Alex Sacerdote of Whale Rock Capital pitched a printed circuit board maker and Leon Shaulov of Maplelane Capital backed semiconductor equipment at the “Intelligence as Infrastructure: How AI Is Rewiring the Economy” panel at Sohn New York 2026 on May 12. The session, moderated by CNBC’s Leslie Picker, ran from 2:40 PM to roughly 3:17 PM. Both managers converged on the view that artificial intelligence adoption is moving faster than any technology cycle in history and that compute shortages will persist for years.

Sacerdote called the trajectory an “L-curve, straight up.” He cited Anthropic’s run rate growing from $100 million to $45 billion annualized in months and projected combined revenue at Anthropic and OpenAI reaching $200 billion by year-end 2026. Shaulov described AI as “a highly deflationary force” long-term but warned of near-term inflation from skyrocketing infrastructure costs and sticky labor markets. Software engineer hiring rose 18 percent last month, he said, driven not by tech firms but by old-economy companies scrambling to implement large language models.

The conversation ranged from foundational model economics to the risks facing legacy software, but the managers saved specifics for the final minutes. Sacerdote named two holdings. Shaulov discussed semiconductor equipment and analog chip makers without disclosing individual positions beyond a reference to “the SMH semiconductor index” he bought for his mother. The picks illustrated the managers’ shared conviction: AI is a compute problem first, and the infrastructure build-out has years to run.