Nvidia delivered once again, with its results proving it’s showing no signs of slowing down. On Wednesday, it reported earnings that beat estimates , with its sales skyrocketing as companies such as Google , Microsoft , Meta , Amazon and OpenAI buy billions of dollars of its graphics processing units amid the artificial intelligence boom. Its shares jumped in extended trading but given the “blowout earnings,” Nancy Tengler of Laffer Tengler Investments said she expected to see a higher move. “But I think a lot of that has been priced in and now you’ll see it trickle out as it has been into other players in in this space,” the chief investment officer told CNBC’s ” Squawk Box Asia ” on Thursday. “We think there’s another way to play this,” she said, adding these are namely buying into “old economy companies,” as well as data center names. “Our investment theme for the last two years and likely for the next five is: ‘old economy companies who are pivoting to digitization, cloud and generative AI computing and the suppliers of the picks and shovels’,” said Tengler. One such “old economy” name is Walmart , according to her. “The poster child is Walmart. They’ve embraced not only digital solutions, but robotics, generative AI and their ad business in cloud computing, obviously in their e-commerce business,” she said. Tengler also named Carrier , which she considers a beneficiary of data center growth. Carrier offers ventilation and air-conditioning services, and cooling is “critical” to data centers, Tengler pointed out. Data centers house vast amounts of computing power needed for AI workloads, and that need is set to grow as many tech companies are rapidly developing infrastructure for artificial intelligence. Large language models require a lot of data center capacity. Quanta Services , which builds infrastructure for electric power and renewables, as well as provides utility performance services, was another pick from Tengler. “[Quanta] is a name that is important to building up the grid and we are going to see significant growth in the energy around generative AI and that means … even though [Quanta] has gone up quite a bit, I think it still has room to run in line with earnings,” she said. Other names she’s bullish on that are in what she called her “best portfolio ideas” list include Oracle , ServiceNow , Amazon, Broadcom , and Microsoft. — CNBC’s Kif Leswing contributed to this report .
