Jim Chanos & Val Zlatev: Long and Short Alpha in AI, Semiconductors, Data Centers, Neoclouds, and Data Centers | MacroMinds Symposium 2026

**Jack Farley** (0:00)
Where to find value in the AI boom on the long side and the short side? This is the question that I asked two great investors earlier this month when I had the privilege of hosting Jim Chanos and Val Zlatev. Jim is a legendary short seller renowned for his short positions in Chinese real estate stocks, Wirecard and of course Enron. Val manages a multi-billion dollar hedge fund with a sterling track record for Alpha Generation in long short investing in semiconductors and tech hardware specifically.
This was at a panel I hosted for MacroMinds Symposium, a mission-driven conference for institutional investors to support student education. This year's symposium raised money for three beneficiaries, NYC First Opportunity Music Project and 100 Women in Finance. Other panelists included giants in the industry such as Apollo's John Zito and Black Rock's Rick Reader. I'm very grateful to MacroMinds and its founder Dean Kernutt for allowing me to be part of it. I'll include more information in the description as well as at the end of the interview where I'll also share some closing thoughts. Let's get into it.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:00)
Please welcome Jim Chanos, Val Zlatev and Jack Farley.

**Jack Farley** (1:16)
Thank you everyone for being here. We got a very special conversation talking about investing in AI and semiconductors on the long side, on the short side as well. Of course, Jim Chanos of Chanos & Company and Val Zlatev of Analog Century Capital Management. I wanna start just your overall outlook on artificial intelligence and the build out that goes with it. Jim, let's start with you and then Val.

**Jim Chanos** (1:41)
Well, as Rick Reader said in the previous panel, I mean, it is dominating everything in the financial markets right now. It's really a unique concept when it comes to particularly the equity markets, but increasingly the credit markets as well. And so, the really interesting thing is, is you talk to people who are far more knowledgeable about it than I am, and you get many different opinions on where it's going, what's going to happen.
And whether there's an ROI at the end of the rainbow. And the answer is nobody knows for sure yet. We're that early on. The one macro comment I'll make since we're at MacroMinds is, I think people should be a little bit careful about extrapolating much broader impacts to global economic growth and earnings growth.
We took a look at the decade that preceded the introduction of Netscape in late 95, early 96, to the decade, the 10 years that had happened after Netscape, the post-Internet era. And it was not penalized by the GFC. It ended in 06, 7 And US economic growth was virtually the same in the decade before the introduction of the Internet versus after the Internet was introduced. And interestingly, corporate profitability, which I would have thought would have had a meaningful increase with productivity, did not increase its growth rate at all. It was 6 percent per year, which is the long-term average in the decade before the Internet versus the decade after the Internet. Now, of course, there's a lot of dynamism in that, and that's the long-winded way of saying there's going to be a lot of dynamism in the winners and losers in the AI economy. But whether it will contribute to overall economic growth and or long-term increase in corporate profitability remains to be seen.

**Val Zlatev** (3:49)
Val?
So I'm not a macro investor and I'm not going to argue about the overall effect on the economy. But from a micro perspective, when we listen to the companies or we talk to the companies that we invest in, both on the long side and the short side, what we've seen is that the effects of AI on the actual individual businesses are pretty well seen. And many of the CEOs of the companies that we cover are quite excited about the impact so far.
And it's very simple to actually just look at headcounts over the last three or four years compared to the operating profits of these companies. And you will see that the headcount has barely budged, for some of them it has declined. Meanwhile, the operating profits have dramatically increased. And I'm not even just talking about memory companies that have increased prices, but I'm just talking about a very wide slew of over 500 companies within hard tech. That's my university's hard tech. So the actual impact is already felt, as we speak, and it's fairly meaningful. To the extent that gets transitioned from the early adopters, the technology companies that are really adopting it, because they kind of eat their own stuff that they're selling, to the rest of the economy, to be seen, right? We shall see how the whole thing evolves.