CNBC Television · Oct 6, 2026
With Jan van Eck, CEO of VanEck
The hyperscalers keep reporting profit growth of about 20% a year, Jan van Eck said, even though they are multi-trillion-dollar companies.
The market is still worried that AI chips will end up in oversupply. Van Eck said demand has far outstripped supply, and that the stocks hit hardest this year, the power producers and nuclear companies that supply data centers, may have reached their low.
"I actually think today is a great day. Maybe we've seen the bottom here with the Constellation deal." — Jan van Eck
Jan van Eck, CEO of VanEck, on CNBC's Power Lunch, founded the firm's ETF business in 2006 and has run the company his father started since 2010. VanEck runs SMH, the semiconductor ETF the host asked him about.
The full segment is covered here so you can skip it.
Here are the 4 arguments that matter.
Key Takeaways
Inflows to VanEck's semiconductor ETF are good but not great, because fear of a chip oversupply has not gone away
The hyperscalers are still growing profits about 20% a year, which van Eck reads as confirmation of the AI trade
The AI 2.0 trade, power producers and nuclear, has suffered this year on political concerns about data centers
Van Eck thinks the fears may now be fully priced into nuclear stocks, though he is not predicting the exact day
What the trade needs, he said, is one nuclear power plant to be permitted
1. Chip Inflows Good, Not Great
The host opened with the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq at record highs, and said a big reason was the AI trade picking up again over the past month. The host listed AMD, Marvell, Synopsys, Cadence Design Systems and Teradyne among the semiconductor stocks that had rallied.
"They are all up at least 20% or more in about 20 trading days." — The host
The host added that the S&P 500 was outperforming a Goldman Sachs index of the S&P 500 without its AI stocks by 5%, and asked whether inflows to VanEck's semiconductor ETF, SMH, were high again.
Van Eck said inflows are consistently good but not great
"Yeah they're good. They're consistently good. Not great." — Jan van Eck
He said the reason is that there is still so much fear in the trade, which he called almost ironic for what has been the biggest investment trend of the past several years.
