Rajiv Jain shifts stance, embraces AI investments after skepticism

Roughly a year after calling the artificial intelligence boom the “dot-com bubble on steroids,” Rajiv Jain has done what fund managers rarely do in public: admitted the market was right and he was wrong. The chairman and CIO of GQG Partners revealed during the firm’s half-year results call in August 2026 that three of its four main funds have shifted to an overweight position in technology and semiconductors. That’s a full 180 from 2025, when Jain was aggressively dumping Nvidia, Alphabet, and Amazon while trimming Microsoft. The cost of being early (or just wrong) The firm bled $15.1 billion in outflows during the first half of 2026. Funds under management dropped from $172.4 billion to $156 billion. The core problem was straightforward. Jain bet against the most powerful momentum trade in a generation. While GQG was underweight tech, the sector kept posting robust growth. Clients noticed, and they voted with their feet. What changed his mind Jain’s original skepticism wasn’t unreasonable. In 2025, AI spending by hyperscalers was accelerating while revenue generation from AI products remained murky. The gap between capital expenditure and actual monetization looked, to a value-ori...