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Tom Slater

Manager, Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust; Partner, Baillie Gifford, Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust

Search every verified Tom Slater interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Tom Slater, manager of Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust and partner at Baillie Gifford, appeared in three recorded discussions between August and October 2026. In a September podcast with Saftar Sarwar, he discussed his career spanning the dot-com bubble, the credit crisis, and the current AI era, and addressed the trust's roughly 20% position in SpaceX, noting that prospective investors should be mindful of this concentration, though he expected it to reduce over time. In an October Q&A session, Slater said AI is amplifying the performance of the best organizations rather than leveling the playing field, and identified chip-level enablers such as Nvidia, TSMC, ASML, and SK Hynix as likely beneficiaries of AI development. In a September panel on China, Slater and colleagues discussed Scottish Mortgage's reduced but deliberate exposure to Chinese equities, down from 24% at the end of 2020 to around 11%. Slater highlighted Chinese companies like BYD and CATL for their vertical integration and innovation in electric vehicles and batteries, and expressed concern about the long-term competitiveness of the European mass auto market. He also contrasted U.S. and Chinese AI approaches, noting that Chinese players often run open-source models to lower adoption costs, and argued that underestimating China's influence on global industries is a greater risk than overestimating it.

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Notable quotes

“The real risk actually travels the other way, is underestimating how much China can shape some of the global industries. We talk about EVs, we talk about batteries through our holdings of CATL and BYD. And also nowadays even in AI, we talk a lot about open source model in China. You can argue they're not frontier enough, but cost and the AI usage is not only for US and China. It can be used in Africa, it can be used ”

“I think they are running two different systems. We talked this a lot. I think in the US, lots of our US holdings are trying to found the AGI solution and trying to build the most powerful frontier model for the users. In China, you probably can see most of the players run open source model. I think the reason for doing that is China wants to bring down the cost of AI adaptation. They want the AI to be applied into di”

“I think for me across multiple conversations it's just been the degree to which AI as a tool is not a democratic tool or a leveler but it is an amplifier of the very best organizations. And that's been going through and having multiple conversations where people have said yes my competitor an incumbent has the same access to the same model but particularly in a regulated industry if it takes them two years to approve”

“I think one place where value goes very strongly and will continue to go is to the companies that are enabling intelligence at the chip level because these companies own bottlenecks within the supply chain. They're in dominant positions and able to develop really really significant profitability and growth. And those are companies like Nvidia, TSMC, ASML, SK Hynix. And I've talked before about how in many ways these ”

“I think that different countries and the companies from the different countries have different strengths and I think there's been a huge amount of creativity in the US in developing these large language models at extraordinarily high cost. You know, if you look at the capital spending commitments of these large language model developers, if you look at the prices they charge, but they have been absolutely at the cutt”

“I think that investing passively is a very reasonable and sensible thing to do and one of the principal reasons for that is it's such low cost way to invest your money. I think if you're going to invest in an active strategy, you want to keep your costs to a minimum as a starting point because that bit is inevitable. You'll pay the costs regardless. And then you want to get a genuinely different exposure to the index”

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