ARK Big Ideas 2026: What Should Investors Know During the AI Great Acceleration?

ARK's Big Ideas 2026 has been released as scheduled. Each year, ARK sifts through short-term noise to find signal and focus on long-term innovation platforms, identifying and contextualizing the technologies reshaping the global economy.

According to ARK Invest, five major innovation platforms—AI, Public Blockchains, Robotics, Energy Storage, and Multiomics—are becoming increasingly interdependent as performance advances in one platform unlock new capabilities in another.

In this “Great Acceleration” wave of technology, which companies have attracted Cathie Wood's attention? Moomoo has extracted a list of public companies that ARK is tracking across five major innovation sectors. Below are the companies mentioned by Cathie Wood in the report, for investors' reference when formulating their 2026 investment strategies.

AI Infrastructure

According to Cathie Wood, AI demand is growing rapidly as inference costs collapse.

By some measures, inference costs have dropped more than 99% in the past year. As AI-native applications proliferate, cost declines are driving explosive growth in the number of tokens inferenced by developers, enterprises, and consumers. Demand for compute on OpenRouter, a unified application programming interface (API) for accessing large language models (LLMs), has increased 25-fold since December 2024.

Since the ChatGPT moment, data center systems growth has accelerated from 5% to 29% annually. In 2025, at ~$500 billion, annual investment in data center systems was nearly 2.5x the average from 2012 through 2023. According to ARK research, this category of investment will continue to inflect and could triple to ~$1.4 trillion in 2030.

Cathie Wood believes that capital expenditure in the tech sector is at tech-and-telecom boom levels, but tech valuations are much lower. As shown in the chart below, the Mag 6's valuations are far below their peak during the dot-com bubble.

Related stocks involved $NVIDIA (NVDA.US)$, $Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.US)$, $Alphabet-C (GOOG.US)$, $Broadcom (AVGO.US)$, $Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM.US)$, $Amazon (AMZN.US)$, $Microsoft (MSFT.US)$, $Meta Platforms (META.US)$, $Apple (AAPL.US)$.

Additionally, Nvidia is facing more competition. Nvidia's early investments in AI chip design, software, and networking propelled its share of GPU sales to 85% and its gross margin to 75%. Now, competitors like $Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.US)$ and $Alphabet-C (GOOG.US)$ have caught up in certain domains like small language model inference. Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell rack-scale system leads in large-model inference, powering the most advanced foundation models.

Bitcoin

ARK believes Bitcoin is maturing as the leader of a new institutional asset class. The market for smart contract networks and pure-play digital currencies—the latter which serve as stores of value, mediums of exchange, and units of account on public blockchains—could grow at an annual rate of ~61% to $28 trillion in 2030. ARK believes bitcoin could account for 70% of the market, the balance dominated by smart contract networks like Ethereum and Solana.

Digital assets could reach $28 trillion in market value in 2030. Based on ARK's forecast, bitcoin is likely to dominate the market cap for cryptocurrencies, increasing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of ~63% during the next five years, from nearly ~$2 trillion to ~$16 trillion by 2030.

Besides, thanks to the GENIUS Act, financial institutions are reassessing their Stablecoin and tokenization strategies, the global market for tokenized assets could surpass $11 trillion in 2030.

Related stocks involved $Circle (CRCL.US)$, $Coinbase (COIN.US)$, $Robinhood (HOOD.US)$.

Multiomics

ARK has outlined an "AI flywheel" blueprint for biological innovation: the deep integration of AI and multi-omics data is creating a self-reinforcing virtuous cycle. More data drives better model, which in turn produces better tools, tests, and treatments. It is this virtuous cycle that could propel human medicine toward an epic transformation by 2030—shifting from reactive "symptomatic treatment" to proactive "root-cause cures.

Multiomics Tools: Generate richer, less expensive biological data that fuel rapid discovery and model improvement.

Related Stocks: $Illumina (ILMN.US)$, $Pacific Biosciences of California (PACB.US)$, $Twist Bioscience (TWST.US)$, $10x Genomics (TXG.US)$.

Molecular Diagnostics: Detect disease earlier and more accurately by integrating multiomics signals with AI.

Related stocks: $Adaptive Biotechnologies (ADPT.US)$, $Tempus AI (TEM.US)$, $Natera (NTRA.US)$.

Drug Development and Cures: Transform biological insights into optimized drug candidates more quickly and efficiently.

AI Developed Drugs related stocks: $Absci Corp (ABSI.US)$, $Recursion Pharmaceuticals (RXRX.US)$, $Generation Bio (GBIO.US)$

Cures related stocks: $Beam Therapeutics (BEAM.US)$, $CRISPR Therapeutics (CRSP.US)$, $Intellia Therapeutics (NTLA.US)$

Robotics

ARK forecases automation is likely to create a $26 trillion opportunity, if humanoids were to penetrate 80% of US households over five years, GDP growth could accelerate from 2-3% per year to 5-6% per year.

Cathie Wood also identified key innovators and pioneers in the robotics sector, including $Tesla (TSLA.US)$, $XPeng (XPEV.US)$, and others.

Cathie Wood believes that robotaxi technology platforms stand to win the majority of the economic value.

Related stocks include $Uber Technologies (UBER.US)$, $Lyft Inc (LYFT.US)$, $Grab Holdings (GRAB.US)$.

Summary

ARK's “Big Ideas 2026” illustrates systemic revolutions across multiple fields. This is not the distant future. From SpaceX's rockets reducing launch costs by 95%, to general-purpose robots handling repetitive tasks in factories, to longevity science accelerated by AI, we can already feel the pulse of change. While risks cannot be ignored, Cathie Wood's enthusiasm for disruptive innovation remains one of the most noteworthy investment philosophies in modern times.

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