Mark Cuban Advises GenZ To 'Spend Every Waking Minute Learning About AI:' Here's A List Of AI Investment Opportunities For Long Term

Billionaire investor Mark Cuban has urged GenZ youth to upscale themselves by learning more about artificial intelligence. As growing AI applications have been disrupting business, here is a list of AI-linked investment opportunities that investors could consider to increase their exposure.

What Happened: During an interaction at South by Southwest or SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, Cuban said that it was pivotal to learn about AI to integrate it into business.

Addressing the entrepreneurship-oriented youth, Cuban said, “I would spend every waking minute learning about AI,” when asked about advice for the next generation of business leaders.

He also used his own Instagram and TikTok feed as an example, stating that it consisted of AI hacks because of the rapid technological changes and AI adoption.

“It’s one thing to have a business and how you integrate AI. But if you’re just getting started, as you learn these things, it’s so much easier to start,” he said.

“Whether you use Perplexity, Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini. It doesn’t matter, right?” he said rhetorically stating that AI tools can “spider everything” from writing emails to doing sales calls.

However he added that most people won’t leverage the capabilities of AI, “But those people who put in the time are going to crush it,” he said.

Why It Matters: The AI race has been intensifying worldwide. The popularity of Chinese AI startup DeepSeek triggered a selloff in AI-linked stocks and major AI chipmaker Nvidia Corp. NVDA in mid-January.

While companies worldwide are finding a way for AI training and inferencing without using Nvidia’s advanced chips, the South China Morning Post reported on Sunday that a Tsinghua University-linked team introduced an AI framework that can work on Chinese-made chips.

Qingcheng.AI and Tsinghua University unveiled Chitu, an LLM inference framework for Chinese chips, challenging Nvidia’s GPUs by supporting models like DeepSeek-R1.

Thus, as AI gains more prominence and global firms strive to improve efficiency, here is a list of AI-exposed exchange-traded funds listed in the U.S. that investors could consider in the long term.

ETF Name	YTD Performance	One Year Performance
iShares US Technology ETF IYW	-8.74%	9.36%
Fidelity MSCI Information Technology Index ETF FTEC	-9.41%	9.04%
First Trust Dow Jones Internet Index Fund FDN	4.21%	13.93%
iShares Expanded Tech Sector ETF IGM	-7.70%	10.80%
iShares Global Tech ETF IXN	-7.21%	6.19%

Price Action: The SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust SPY and Invesco QQQ Trust ETF QQQ, which track the S&P 500 index and Nasdaq 100 index, respectively, dropped in premarket on Monday. The SPY was down 0.30% to $561.12, and the QQQ also declined 0.17% to $478.85, according to Benzinga Pro data.

SPY closed 2.07% higher at $562.81 and QQQ rose 2.42% to $479.66 on Friday.

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