Cathie Wood Sells Palantir and AMD, Pours Millions Into Pre-Revenue Archer Aviation and Cerebras

The trade

ARK Invest's public trade disclosures show Cathie Wood sold 38,395 shares of Palantir Technologies and 19,491 shares of Advanced Micro Devices on Tuesday, September 8, 2026, according to Benzinga and Crypto Briefing. Palantir closed that day at $170.30, down 2.31%, making the sale worth roughly $6.54 million. AMD closed at $505.74, putting the sale at about $9.9 million.

Same day, ARK bought 575,700 shares of Archer Aviation for roughly $3.35 million, according to BigGo Finance. That pushes ARK's total Archer position to nearly 31.96 million shares, worth approximately $151 million as of the second quarter of 2026, per Crypto Briefing. ARK now owns about 4.09% of Archer's outstanding shares.

What Archer actually is

Archer Aviation has $6.9 million in trailing revenue, according to The Motley Fool. That is not a typo. The stock trades around $5.26 a share, down from its $10 IPO price nearly five years ago, and carries a market cap between $4.1 billion and $4.5 billion depending on the source. It's traded as low as $4.30 and as high as $14.62 over the past year.

Archer builds the Midnight, an electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft meant to shuttle passengers around cities. The company recently completed a piloted round-trip flight between Salinas and Hollister, California, which it's framing as a step toward FAA certification and paying customers, according to BigGo Finance. It also has a deal to be the official air taxi provider for the Los Angeles Olympics.

Analyst consensus rates Archer a Strong Buy, with the highest average price-target upside of any name in ARK's recent buying spree, near 99%, according to BigGo Finance. That's a forecast, not a fact. Nobody has flown paying customers commercially yet, and certification timelines for eVTOL aircraft have slipped before.

The bigger rotation

Wood didn't stop at Archer. ARK also bought 27,083 shares of Robinhood Markets for about $3.2 million and 32,561 shares of Cerebras Systems for roughly $6.5 million, both on September 8, according to Benzinga. Robinhood is expanding into prediction markets through a partnership with Crypto.com. Cerebras just signed a seven-year data center deal in Finland, though its stock has been volatile.

ARK also added 2,341 shares of Rocket Lab, on top of more than $44 million in Rocket Lab purchases in late August and early September, per BigGo Finance.

Separately, TradingView reported ARK bought roughly $28 million of Meta Platforms while selling a near-identical dollar amount of Alphabet, about 86,000 shares worth $28.6 million. ARK also bought over 534,000 shares of Beam Therapeutics for about $14 million, plus stakes in CRISPR Therapeutics and Intellia Therapeutics, while trimming Tempus AI, Twist Bioscience and 10x Genomics. That's a full-scale bet shift from AI-adjacent software toward speculative gene-editing names, layered on top of the aerospace rotation.

Tesla stays untouched

Through all of this, ARK has not sold a share of Tesla, according to PrimeXBT. Tesla trades around $350 a share with a $1.1 trillion market cap, and it's trailing every other Magnificent Seven stock in 2026. ARK still holds roughly $1 billion in Tesla and has actually raised its long-term price target to $4,600 a share, up from $3,000.

Wood's reasoning has nothing to do with car sales anymore. Ninety percent of that price target rests on Tesla's robotaxi business, which doesn't generate meaningful revenue today. Wood told reporters, "That's how quickly AI is going to cause these things to happen," referring to self-driving deployment. A McKinsey & Co. survey previously projected robotaxis reaching scale by 2029; the latest update pushes that to 2030. ARK has now pushed its own Tesla timeline back at least once already.

The obvious pushback

Anyone skeptical of this strategy has a fair point: putting tens of millions of investor dollars into a company with $6.9 million in trailing revenue, a stock that's lost half its value since IPO, and no commercial flights yet is a high-risk bet by any normal standard. Retail investors who buy ARK's ETFs to ride Wood's stock picks are absorbing that risk whether they realize it or not.

Wood's defenders would note she's been early and right before, and that Archer's Strong Buy consensus and Olympic partnership reflect real institutional confidence, not just hype. Both things can be true. The stock's 52-week range of $4.30 to $14.62 shows how violently that bet can swing in either direction.

ARK's next 13F filing, due after the current quarter closes, will show whether Wood keeps adding to Archer and Tesla or starts trimming. If she starts selling either position at scale, given ARK now owns over 4% of Archer's shares outstanding, that alone could move the stock.