AI, credit card rates, housing — what 6 of our portfolio name CEOs said in Davos
The World Economic Forum, each year, becomes the center of the universe for one week in January in Davos, Switzerland. This year, six CEOs of portfolio companies were interviewed on CNBC throughout the week. They discussed topics ranging from artificial intelligence to America’s housing affordability crisis. Here is what they had to say. 1. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy explained why having the company’s own custom silicon matters. “If you’re building a big inference business like we are, and you want to have reasonable margins. If you’re not pursuing your own custom AI silicone, you’re going to be structurally disadvantaged,” Jassy said on Tuesday. So, does that mean Jassy thinks Nvidia ‘s chips cost too much? “It is undeniable that customers want better price performance. And, if customers are going to be able to roll out AI as expansively as we believe they want to, and they should, the cost of inference has to come down. So that’s why we pursued Trainium.” Amazon reports earnings after the bell on Feb. 5. 2 . Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff touched on the narrative that AI is cannibalizing enterprise software. “The rate of growth with AI with Salesforce has been awesome,” Benioff said Tuesday. “We’re just going to continue to do more.” Benioff also advocated for more AI-centered regulation. “It can’t be just growth at any cost. There has to be some regulation.” He added, “It’s funny, tech companies, they hate regulation. They hate it, except for one. They love Section 230, which basically says they’re not responsible,” Benioff said. “That’s probably something that needs to get reshaped, shifted, changed.” Salesforce reports earnings late in the cycle and won’t be out with its latest quarterly results until March. 3. Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins dove into the AI boom and what’s ahead in 2026. “The hyperscalers and the cloud providers and the model builders and all that, I think they have obviously been investing in a very big way. And, we work very closely with them, and they give us lots of requirements. A lot of these customers are so big that they have their own individual requirements that we design, too,” Robbins said Wednesday. “In the enterprise, I think we’re seeing obviously some pilot applications. You see a lot of stuff happening in customer service. You see a lot of applications in manufacturing. We see retail deploying agents to handheld devices for their staff in the stores.” Cisco is expected to report earnings in mid-to-late February. “The good news,” according to Robbins, “is we’re viewed as having a robust, broad, global go-to-market capability in the enterprise. So a lot of these companies want to partner with us to take these services to the enterprise. So that’s positive.” 4. Honeywell CEO Vimal Kapur talked about how the company is convincing clients to use its quantum computing solution. “It requires us to educate people on this movement. I think some of the new technology trend, there’s a fad behind it and there’s a bubble and then there are real people. The difference is Quantinuum is owned by a public company called Honeywell, which is very responsible. Every statement has to be done carefully. You can’t overstate and underdeliver because that’s how we are trained. So to your question, we are working with large banks, large pharmaceutical companies to show them the way of the power of quantum, which will be imminent coming in, and also working with Nvidia to co-create a software environment so that you can share the workload, ” Kapur said Wednesday. Honeywell, which has taken the first steps to bring Quantinuum public, reports earnings this coming Thursday. We booked some Honeywell profits last week. 5. Wells Fargo CEO Charles Scharf shared his thoughts about President Donald Trump ‘s efforts to cap credit card interest rates at 10% for a year. “We offer products that are well below 10% for an extended period of time, so I understand that. I think we just got to be very focused on what we’re trying to solve,” Scharf said Thursday ahead of the president speech in Davos and interview on CNBC. “What we don’t want to do is put in artificial price controls that could be harmful at a period of time when it matters most to Americans that need credit.” Wells Fargo’s stock came into last week’s earnings hot and suffered the cost of not wowing Wall Street with the quarter and guidance. We booked profits in Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs ahead of earnings to protect gains, and we’re glad we did. 6. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon touched on the housing affordability crisis and the potential use of 401(k)s to fund home purchases. “It’s an interesting idea,” Solomon said Thursday. “You’ve got to think carefully through the consequences of that and how you would do it and how you would make it work. Home ownership in the long run … has been a great source of savings and stability for Americans. I think things that we can do to accelerate that and make it more accessible will be very positive.” Solomon cautioned about Trump’s idea to ban large institutional investors from buying single-family homes: “There are all different forms of institutional capital that buy homes in the United States, not just the public companies. … There’s also institutional capital formation that supports the accumulation of housing in the United States. … The bigger issue is supply and the availability of housing stock.” Goldman shares shot higher on earnings last week but have since trended lower. (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long AMZN, CRM, CSCO, GS, HON, WFC. See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.
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