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T. Rowe Price Eyes AI 'Sleepers' Beyond Chip Stocks

BY | ETF Database
7:18 am ET 08/24/26 | 21 VIEWS
Most of the attention in the artificial intelligence (AI) trade goes to chipmakers and cloud giants. However, T. Rowe Price portfolio managers say that the market’s next “sleepers” could be sitting somewhere investors aren’t looking yet.Key Takeaways: T. Rowe Price managers say AI’s next winners may sit outside chipmakers and cloud providers. Robotics, healthcare data, and industrial firms are flagged as possible AI “sleeper” plays. TMSL, an active small-mid cap ETF, holds sizable stakes in those same sectors. Tech-focused portfolios, like the actively managed T. Rowe Price Technology ETF (managed by Dom Rizzo) are one straightforward way to access that chipmaker and cloud buildout. Shaun Currie and Jon Friar, speaking on T. Rowe Price’s “The Angle” podcast, noted that other paths into AI exposure exist too. They pointed to healthcare, robotics, financials, and industrials as beneficiaries once AI moves beyond today’s data center buildout. The buildout itself, they said, covers only the earliest stage of a shift expected to play out over decades. See more: The Hidden Strength of Active Sector ETFs Spiking Right Now Currie calls the moment a “data center cycle” rather than an “AI cycle,” one phase within a longer arc. He compared it to the internet buildout of the late 1990s, a five-to-seven-year hardware cycle. It gave way to two decades of follow-on booms in e-commerce, mobile phones, and cloud computing. Small companies stand to capture more than their share, Currie said, because AI adoption doesn’t reward size the way earlier technology waves did. He noted that a $20 million annual AI budget would put a company in the top 20% of corporate spenders. It’s a bar many smaller firms can already clear, one likely to drop further as AI costs decline.Where AI 'Sleepers' May EmergeRobotics is an area that Currie is watching. “Programming a robot today costs more than building a robot,” he said. Cheaper AI-driven programming could let robots handle more than one task, lowering their cost and creating a self-enforcing flywheel. Healthcare and biology data providers are another focus, according to Currie. Frontier AI labs are pouring resources into biology-related research, he said. Companies that supply the data behind it carry less downside than AI hardware stocks that have already logged “this big massive run.” As for large caps, Friar said he screens for AI sleepers using three traits. Technical depth reaching into the executive suite is one, along with network effects that lock in users. A third is physical assets, like sensors or logistics networks, that are harder for competitors to copy. A way for investors to gain exposure to AI sleepers is through T. Rowe Price’s actively managed ETFs. Managed by Jodi Love, the T. Rowe Price Small-Mid Cap ETF (TMSL B+) leans heavily on industrials, healthcare, and financials. Benchmarked to the Russell 2500 Index, TMSL can lean into the firm’s proprietary research, and navigate within and beyond the index for innovative SMID-cap opportunities. As of June 30, industrials and business services made up 22% of the portfolio and healthcare 16.7%, per the fund’s factsheet. Spotting a bottom-up opportunity is itself an AI-assisted exercise, Currie said. The company can now produce a full company initiation on any Russell 2500 stock in about five minutes. A full industry model — the kind that might have taken roughly three months by hand for an analyst — now takes about six hours. For more news, information, and analysis, visit our Active ETF Content Hub.

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