David Tepper's Quiet Pivot: Out of China, All-In on the AI Supply Chain

Two years ago, David Tepper told CNBC to "buy everything" China. His Q1 2026 13F tells a very different story. Appaloosa Management's latest filing shows the famed distressed-debt investor methodically unwinding his China exposure while concentrating the portfolio around a single, coherent thesis: the AI supply chain, from silicon to electricity.

The Portfolio at a Glance

Appaloosa's disclosed 13F portfolio came in at roughly $5.9 billion across just 31 holdings — a notably tight book, even by Tepper's concentrated standards. The top five positions tell you most of what you need to know: Amazon (~15%), Micron (~9.5%), Alphabet (~8.4%), Uber (~7.7%), and Taiwan Semiconductor (~7.6%). Nearly half the portfolio sits in five names, all of them levered in some way to AI compute, AI-adjacent infrastructure, or the platforms deploying it.

You can see how Tepper's book stacks up against other tracked managers on his InvestorLens investor page, and compare position-level overlap with peers like Druckenmiller and Cohen using the overlap tool.

Doubling Down on Amazon

The headline move: Appaloosa increased its Amazon stake by 98% during the quarter, making it the fund's largest position at roughly $900 million. Tepper isn't alone here — Seth Klarman's Baupost also built a major Amazon position in Q1, a rare point of agreement between two very different styles of investor. When a macro trader and a deep-value manager converge on the same mega-cap, it usually means the stock screens attractive on multiple frameworks at once: AWS as an AI infrastructure play, retail margins inflecting, and a valuation that lagged its Mag-7 peers through early 2026.

The China Unwind

The quieter story is what Tepper sold. Appaloosa cut its Alibaba stake — long the emblem of his China trade — and fully exited the FXI China large-cap ETF. In their place, the fund added to EWY, the South Korea ETF, which offers Asia tech exposure through memory makers like SK Hynix and Samsung without the geopolitical overhang. It reads less like a retreat from Asia and more like a rotation within it: away from Chinese consumer platforms, toward the countries that actually manufacture the AI hardware stack.

Chips, Power, and the Picks-and-Shovels Trade

Beyond Amazon, the buys cluster tightly around AI infrastructure. Appaloosa boosted Uber by 242%, raised Vistra Energy by 114%, added 18% to Taiwan Semiconductor, and increased Micron. It also opened a new ~$179 million position in Sandisk — a name we flagged as a broader smart-money memory trade in our earlier post on SNDK. The Vistra add is particularly telling: independent power producers have become the consensus way to play surging data-center electricity demand, a theme visible across many of the funds tracked in our macro consensus dashboard.

On the sell side, Tepper exited all three of his airline holdings — American, Delta, and United — along with a handful of industrial and consumer names. Whatever reopening or travel-demand thesis remained from prior years is gone. The portfolio has been consolidated around one idea, expressed across every layer: memory (MU, SNDK), fabrication (TSM), power (VST), cloud (AMZN, GOOGL), and AI-enabled platforms (UBER).

What It Means for 13F Watchers

Tepper's filings are worth taking seriously for a reason his peers' sometimes aren't: Appaloosa runs a concentrated book and holds positions long enough that the quarterly snapshot genuinely reflects conviction rather than fleeting trades. Three takeaways stand out. First, the China-to-AI rotation is now nearly complete across the elite macro funds — Michael Burry made a similar exit last quarter. Second, the AI trade among sophisticated investors has moved decisively from the model builders to the physical bottlenecks: memory, fabs, and megawatts. Third, Amazon has become the rare mega-cap where value and growth investors overlap, which you can track in real time on our fund flow page.

Q2 filings land in mid-August, and the question worth watching is whether Tepper held this concentration through the spring volatility — or used it to add. Either answer will be informative.

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Data sourced from public SEC 13F filings. Educational research only — not investment advice.