Top hedge fund investors warn the easy AI gains may be ending—and are quietly shifting their bets to overlooked sectors like life science tools and drug manufacturing.

What happened

Ben Silver and David Tykocinski, co-chief investment officers at Maverick Capital, argue that the value from AI infrastructure spending is beginning to migrate back downstream toward enterprise applications and tools, away from the pure hardware and chip fabrication layer that has dominated returns since 2021. Silver, meanwhile, is hunting for opportunity in life science tools companies—the suppliers of equipment and consumables for drug discovery and manufacturing—which he says capital has abandoned and whose stocks are currently 'left for dead.'

Why it matters

For roughly four years, AI infrastructure—Nvidia chips, data centers, energy systems—has been the dominant investment trade. These investors believe that phase is nearing a shift. The practical deployment of AI inside companies is turning out to be integration with existing enterprise systems rather than replacement of them, which changes which technologies become bottlenecks and where profits concentrate. At the same time, a major push to reshore pharmaceutical manufacturing to the U.S., combined with AI-driven drug discovery, creates a convergence of tailwinds in an overlooked sector that the market hasn't yet priced in.

What to watch

Silver expects reshoring capex spending to show up in life science tools company earnings within three to six months. He also notes that three to five major consolidators in the sector are well-capitalized, and with $5 billion（約8000億円）–$10 billion（約1.6兆円） companies trading at depressed valuations, meaningful M&A activity is possible. Tykocinski's broader concern is that hardware and materials businesses face long-term commodification pressure, particularly where Chinese competition has historically been relentless.