Shares in Magda Wierzycka’s Sygnia Holdings rose on Monday after the fintech investor rewarded stakeholders with a higher dividend and doubled down on its forecast of an AI windfall in global markets.Wierzycka told shareholders in her biannual letter that AI has been the primary theme for markets over the past six months, fuelling an about 6.9% return from the JSE top 40 index and driving R8bn in market appreciation for the firm’s portfolio.The adoption of AI tools across many industries, the looming initial public listings of large language model owners OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI, and the technology firms that have emerged as financial backers of AI innovation have all stirred a frenzy of tech stock buying which Wierzycka said now overshadows geopolitical market drivers in the group’s outlook.(Dorothy Kgosi) “The AI investment theme has dwarfed any concerns about the economic impact of political disruption,” her letter reads.Heady ideas around the explosion of AI’s capability and integration have seen global stock markets, particularly the tech-heavy Nasdaq index, soaring over the past year.As established tech giants such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon invest billions into their own data centre builds and launch aggressive AI-adoption programmes, investors anticipating an AI popularity surge have steadily increased their stakes in the companies, which now make up nearly a third of the S&P 500 index.Meanwhile, tightening supply of data centre hardware has boosted Asian giants which dominate the supply of memory chips, such as Samsung and SK Hynix, more than doubling the size of South Korea’s stock market since the end of last year.In South Africa, the growing focus on AI by Naspers subsidiary Tencent means investors are benefitting from China’s push to become a dominant player in the global AI race through exposure to the JSE-listed tech giant and its subsidiary Prosus.Naspers is the second largest listing in the JSE’s top 40 index, which is tracked by Sygnia’s most popular fund.Wierzycka has placed AI at the centre of her growth plans since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022 by releasing a suite of AI funds that package global technology and AI exposure for South African investors into rand-denominated funds.Soon after ChatGPT’s release, Sygnia was marketing itself as the first asset manager to launch a tech and AI-focused actively managed exchange-traded fund (ETF). Earlier this year, it went a step further by launching a specialised venture capital fund specifically for local AI startups.The company, South Africa’s second-largest multimanager asset management group, reported a stellar interim performance for the six months to end-March, with headline earnings per share jumping 22% to 138.1c.It boasted an after-tax profit of R216m, up 25%, even as operating expenses rose by 21.6% (attributed to increased investment in staff and technology), as revenue rose by 24.3% to R616m.The group declared a total dividend of 122c for the first half of the financial year, about 25% higher than in the same period last year.Shares in the group climbed as much as 3.7% on the release of the results to their highest level since February this year at R33.50 — less than R3 short of the record high they achieved in December.In the past five years, Sygnia shares have gained just shy of 75% as the firm grew its assets under management and administration from R251bn to over R460bn.The outlook for AI is not all rosy. Wierzycka’s letter to shareholders also notes some well-trodden concerns about the threat AI poses to job markets.“We will likely soon learn that strong GDP growth, fuelled by infrastructure spending, can co-exist with rising unemployment,” she said.But South Africa, said Wierzycka, is no more vulnerable to the threat of AI than the world’s largest economy. She has previously emphasised that AI will affect only white-collar jobs, unlike recent innovations in manufacturing robotics and other sectors.“From initially being a target of US wrath, South Africa has become an observer. Perhaps that is the best place for us to be.”