AI, credit card rates, housing — what 6 of our portfolio name CEOs said in Davos
The World Economic Forum becomes the center of the universe for a week every 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’s what they had to say. 1. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy explained why it’s important for the company to have its own custom silicon. “If you’re building a large inference business like we are and you want to have reasonable margins. If you’re not building your own custom AI silicon, you’re going to be at a structural disadvantage,” Jassy said Tuesday. So does this mean Jassy thinks Nvidia chips are too expensive? “There’s no denying that customers want better price performance. And if customers are going to be able to deliver AI as comprehensively as we believe they want and need to do, the cost of inference needs to come down. That’s why we pursued Trainium.” Amazon reports earnings after the bell on February 5. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff addressed the narrative that AI is destroying enterprise software. “The growth rate of AI with Salesforce is amazing,” Benioff said Tuesday. “We will continue to do more.” Benioff also advocated for more AI-centric regulation. “It can’t just be growth at any cost. There needs to be some regulation.” “It’s funny, tech companies hate regulations. They hate it, except for one thing. They love Section 230, which basically says they’re not liable,” Benioff said. “This is something that probably needs to be reshaped, shifted, changed.” Salesforce reports earnings late in the cycle and won’t release its latest quarterly results until March. 3. Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins focused on the artificial intelligence boom and what awaits us in 2026. “The hyperscalers, the cloud providers, and the model builders and all of those things, they’re obviously making huge investments. And we work very closely with them, and they provide us with a lot of requirements. Many of these customers are so large that they have their own individual requirements that we design into,” Robbins said Wednesday. “I think we’re clearly seeing some pilots in the enterprise space. You’re seeing a lot of things happening in customer service. You’re seeing a lot of applications in manufacturing. We’re seeing retailers deploying handheld agents for their staff in stores.” Cisco is expected to report earnings in mid-to-late February. According to Robbins, “The good news is that we are viewed in the organization as having a solid, broad, global go-to-market capability. So a lot of these companies are looking to partner with us to bring those services into the organization. So that’s a positive.” 4. Honeywell CEO Vimal Kapur talked about how the company is convincing its customers to use its quantum computing solution. “It requires us to educate people about this movement. I think there’s a fad behind some of the new tech trends, and there’s a bubble, and then there’s real people. The difference is Quantinuum is owned by a publicly traded company called Honeywell, and it’s a very responsible company. Every statement has to be made carefully. That’s how we’re trained because you can’t overstate or understate. So to your question, we’re working with big banks, big pharmaceutical companies to show them the way to the power of quantum,” Kapur said on Wednesday. We’ll work with Nvidia to co-create a software environment so you can share the workload.” Honeywell, which is taking the first steps to take Quantinuum public, will report earnings next Thursday. We booked some profits from Honeywell last week. 5. Wells Fargo CEO Charles Scharf shared his thoughts on President Donald Trump’s efforts to cap credit card interest at 10 percent for a year. Scharf said Thursday ahead of the president’s speech in Davos and his interview on CNBC. “We’ve been offering products well below 10% for a long time, so I understand that. I think we need to be very focused on what we’re trying to solve.” “What we don’t want to do is engage in artificial price controls that could be harmful at a time when that’s the most important thing for Americans who need credit.” Shares of Wells Fargo came hot on last week’s earnings and paid the price for failing to surprise Wall Street with the quarter and guidance. We booked profits before earnings at Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs to protect our earnings, and we’re glad we did. 6. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon responded to the housing affordability crisis and “It’s an interesting idea,” Solomon said Thursday, touching on the potential use of 401(k)s to finance home purchases. “You have to think carefully about the implications of this, how you’re going to do it, and how you’re going to execute it. Over the long term, homeownership has been a major source of savings and stability for Americans. I think the things we can do to speed this up and make it more accessible would be very positive.” Solomon cautioned about Trump’s idea of banning large institutional investors from buying single-family homes: “There are different types of institutional capital that buy homes in the United States, not just public companies. … There is also institutional capital formation that supports housing accumulation in the United States. … The bigger issue is supply and housing stock availability.” Goldman shares rose 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 stocks.) When you subscribe to the CNBC Investment Club with Jim Cramer, you’ll receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. 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