Small tech fund gives investors a shortcut to AI profits

Investors looking to cash in on AI’s rise often face a tough choice: buy early-stage startups at sky-high prices or wait for a safer public stock to climb. One fund, BlackRock’s Science and Technology Term Trust, offers a middle path. It holds a mix of fast-growing tech names—including a tiny slice of the AI leader Anthropic—and pays an 8. 3% dividend. That’s rare for a fund loaded with cutting-edge, pre-IPO companies. Even better, the stock trades 11% below the value of its holdings, a gap that’s widened partly because of geopolitical tensions. That discount might not last once the market wakes up to Anthropic’s explosive growth. Anthropic’s numbers tell the bigger story. The company’s projected annual revenue hit $30 billion—more than the combined sales of Clorox, Ralph Lauren, and a handful of other household names. What’s stunning isn’t just the size, but the speed: that revenue jumped over 200% in a single year. For a fund like BSTZ, even a small stake in Anthropic helps. Still, the real lesson isn’t about one company. It’s about the steady spread of AI beyond Silicon Valley, into retail, finance, and even clothing brands.Not every AI winner is obvious. NVIDIA gets most of the attention for powering AI servers, but its stock has already run up over 1, 000%. That means future gains might be smaller. Meanwhile, companies making the nuts and bolts of AI—memory chips, storage drives—have quietly outperformed NVIDIA over the past year. They’re still cheap compared to the demand they’re seeing. The next wave of AI profits could come from businesses still figuring out how to use the technology, like banks and insurers. The bottleneck won’t be the tech itself. It’ll be how fast old-school industries adopt it. Twenty years ago, companies that figured out e-commerce early dominated their sectors. The same pattern is repeating with AI now. Funds like BSTZ give investors a way to bet on that shift without gambling on a single stock. The 8. 3% payout and 11% discount sweeten the deal.