BG US Growth Trust Annual Results 31 May 2026

Baillie Gifford US Growth Trust plc ('USA')

Legal Entity Identifier: 213800UM1OUWXZPKE539

Regulated Information Classification: Notice of Results

Results for the year ended 31 May 2026

During the financial year to 31 May 2026, the Company's share price and net asset value ('NAV' after deducting borrowings at fair value) returned 44.5% and 31.0% respectively. This compares with a total return of 29.8% for the S&P 500 Index^* (in sterling terms).

¾    As at 31 May 2026, we held 27 private company investments which collectively comprised 45.0% of total assets.

¾    Turnover in the portfolio over the financial year was 23.7% which is consistent with our five year plus time horizon.

¾    Two new private company investments were made: Anthropic and OpenAI.

¾    Twelve listed holdings were added to the portfolio: Alphabet, AppLovin, Axon Enterprise, Broadcom, Circle Internet Group, Coinbase Global, Figma, Knife River, Mastercard, Medline, RBC Bearings and United Therapeutics.

¾    Airbnb, Capital One, Chewy, Datadog, Doximity, Globant SA, Ginkgo Bioworks, Inspire Medical Systems, Penumbra, Pinterest, Roku, Sana Biotechnology and The Trade Desk were listed holdings sold during the period.

Tom Burnet, Chair:

"The Company's strategy is to identify and own exceptional American growth companies: businesses that address large market opportunities, possess durable competitive advantages and distinctive cultures, and have the potential to deliver significant share price upside. This strategy is delivering results. Furthermore, the Manager sees further exciting opportunities for shareholder value creation ahead. AI, automation, space, healthcare and other transformative technologies are creating new markets and new winners. The Company is well positioned to capture the best of them.

"Our aim is to find and back the exceptional companies on the right side of change and to be patient with them. Through this lens, our conviction in the portfolio and the outlook for this strategy is as high as ever.

"On behalf of the Board, I would like to express my gratitude to shareholders with whom we have engaged and who have consistently expressed their support for this strategy. As per the Circular which we have published today, we ask that shareholders once again make their voices heard and vote at the forthcoming AGM to protect their Company and back this Board."

The Company has today published and made available to shareholders a separate circular containing the Notice of Annual General Meeting, together with details of the resolutions to be proposed at the meeting and information regarding attendance and voting arrangements. The Annual General Meeting will be held on 23 October 2026 at 1.00pm at the offices of Stephenson Harwood LLP in London (1 Finsbury Circus, London, EC2M 7SH).

THIS YEAR'S AGM IS CRITICAL TO THE FUTURE OF YOUR COMPANY.

SABA IS COUNTING ON YOU NOT VOTING YOUR SHARES SO IT CAN GAIN CONTROL. DO NOT LET IT.

USE YOUR VOTE. PROTECT YOUR TRUST. BACK YOUR BOARD.

Baillie Gifford US Growth Trust seeks to invest predominantly in listed and unlisted US companies which the Company believes have the potential to grow substantially faster than the average company, and to hold onto them for long periods of time, in order to produce long term capital growth. The Company has total assets of £995.5 million (before deduction of loans of £37.1 million) as at 31 May 2026.

You can find up to date performance information about Baillie Gifford US Growth on the Company website at bgusgrowthtrust.com^‡.

Baillie Gifford US Growth Trust is managed by Baillie Gifford & Co, the Edinburgh based fund management group with approximately £197 billion under management and advice in active equity and bond portfolios for clients in the UK and throughout the world (as at 30 June 2026).

^*         Source: LSEG and relevant underlying index providers. See disclaimer at the end of this announcement. For a definition of terms see Glossary of terms and alternative performance measures at the end of this announcement.

^‡         Neither the contents of the Company website nor the contents of any website accessible from hyperlinks on the Company website (or any other website) is incorporated into, or forms part of, this announcement.

Past performance is not a guide to future performance. The value of an investment and any income from it is not guaranteed and may go down as well as up and investors may not get back the amount invested. This is because the share price is determined by the changing conditions in the relevant stock markets in which the Company invests and by the supply and demand for the Company's shares.

17 September 2026

For further information please contact:

Naomi Cherry, Baillie Gifford & Co

Tel: 0131 275 2000

Henry Wilson, Burson Buchanan

Tel: 020 7466 5000

The following text is extracted from the Annual Report and Financial Statements of the Company for the year ended 31 May 2026 which was approved by the Board on 16 September 2026. All page numbers below refer to the Annual Report and Financial Statements which will be made available on the Company's website.

Chair's statement

I am pleased to report on the Company's performance for the financial year ended 31 May 2026.

During the year, the Company's share price and net asset value (NAV) total returns, calculated by deducting borrowings at fair value, were 44.5% and 31.0% respectively. This compares favourably with a total return of 29.8% for the S&P 500 Index (in sterling terms). Much of the value enhancement this year was driven by our long-term, high-conviction, private holdings including four of the top five contributors: SpaceX, Anthropic, Stripe and Databricks. Thus demonstrating the value of our public and private, high conviction, long term approach.

Since launch on 23 March 2018, the Company's share price and NAV total returns, calculated by deducting borrowings at fair value, have been 244.3% and 253.6% respectively compared with a total return of 250.7% for the S&P 500 Index (in sterling terms).

Further information on the Company's portfolio performance is provided by our portfolio managers, Gary Robinson and Kirsty Gibson, in their Managers' Review.

Share issuance and buybacks

The Company's shares moved from a discount of 9.4% at the start of the financial year to a discount of 0.1% at 31 May 2026 as your Board continued to pursue initiatives to address the discount. The Board continues to regard the management of the discount as an important responsibility and regularly reviews the operation of the Company's liquidity policy. The Board believes that a liquid and well-functioning secondary market is important for all shareholders. Buybacks are not intended to target a specific discount level but rather to mitigate excessive discount volatility.

During the year the Company bought back 4.5 million shares at a total cost of approximately £11.9 million. These purchases were made at a discount to net asset value and were accretive to ongoing shareholders. The Board believes that retaining flexibility in the use of buybacks remains appropriate while continuing to carefully monitor both shareholder feedback and prevailing market conditions.

As at 31 May 2026, the Company had authority, granted at the 2025 Annual General Meeting, to buy back 40,949,570 shares. This authority will expire at the forthcoming Annual General Meeting and the Board will seek shareholder approval to renew it. At the time of writing, the Company does not have authority to issue shares on a non-pre-emptive basis, as the relevant resolution was not approved at the 2025 Annual General Meeting, with the substantial majority of votes cast against the resolution attributable to a single shareholder. The Board believes that having the authority to issue shares is an important component of a well‑functioning capital management framework and remains in the best interest of shareholders. Issuing shares at a premium to net asset value creates value for existing shareholders, increases the Company's scale and liquidity and enables new investors to access the Company's strategy without driving the share price to an excessive premium. Importantly, the authority provides flexibility rather than an obligation to issue shares. The Board would only utilise it when satisfied that doing so was in the interests of existing shareholders. Accordingly, the Board will be seeking shareholder approval at the forthcoming Annual General Meeting to obtain authority to issue shares on a non pre-emptive basis.

Gearing

The Company continues to make prudent use of gearing in support of its long-term investment objective.

The Company's two US$25 million revolving credit facilities remained available throughout the year and were fully drawn at 31 May 2026. These facilities provide flexibility to support investment in attractive opportunities as they arise. Net gearing at the year end was 3% (2025 - 4%).

Subsequent to the year end on 30 July 2026, the Company's existing revolving credit facilities were refinanced with a new unsecured US$50 million three-year revolving credit facility provided by Royal Bank of Scotland International Limited. The Board continues to regard modest gearing as an important tool in support of the Company's investment strategy, providing the Managers with additional flexibility to invest in high-conviction opportunities. In agreeing the new facility, the Board gave careful consideration to its cost, maturity profile and covenant terms.

Earnings and dividend

The Company's investment strategy remains the delivery of long-term capital growth by identifying exceptional American growth businesses and owning them for long enough that the advantages of their business models and cultural strengths become the dominant drivers of their valuations. Accordingly, the Company has no dividend target and does not seek to provide shareholders with a particular level of income.

The net revenue return per share for the year was a negative 2.58p (2025 - negative 2.54p). As the revenue account remains in deficit, the Board has determined that no final dividend will be paid. Should underlying income increase in future years, the Board will seek to distribute the minimum amount required to maintain investment trust status.

Private company investments

At the year end, private company investments represented 45.0% of total assets and were invested across 27 companies (2025 - 34.9% invested in 27 companies). Subsequent to the year end, on 12 June 2026 the investment in SpaceX listed on the Nasdaq. At 14 September 2026 private companies comprised 28.9% of the Company's total assets.

The Board continues to believe that access to exceptional private growth businesses remains an important differentiator for the Company and a significant source of long-term opportunity for shareholders who would otherwise find it difficult to access these opportunities. The Managers remain disciplined in identifying new opportunities while maintaining a high conviction approach to existing holdings. However, as explained in more detail in the Managers' Review, the period since the IPO and the volatility of the Company's portfolio during and after COVID in particular, have taught our portfolio managers' some lessons in portfolio construction, and they have been applying them and will continue to do so.

The valuation process for private company investments continues to operate on a rolling cycle overseen by Baillie Gifford's independent valuations group, with advice from an external third party. The Board reviews and challenges valuations regularly and receives detailed reporting throughout the year. These valuations are also subject to scrutiny as part of the annual external audit process.

Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) matters

The Managers believe that sustainability is an integral component of long-term investing. Their approach to stewardship and active engagement is outlined in more detail elsewhere in this report. The Company's portfolio continues to be invested predominantly in entrepreneurial, innovative and technology-enabled businesses, many of which are seeking to address significant long-term challenges and opportunities.

Board composition

As noted in the Interim Results, the Board was pleased to appoint Liz Flockhart, during the period. Liz was appointed following a comprehensive recruitment process, using an independent search firm, to ensure that the skills, experience and perspectives added would continue to support the Company's long-term strategic objectives. While the search initially focused on candidates from non-white ethnically diverse backgrounds, the Board concluded that Liz's relevant experience and broader skills made her the strongest candidate.

The appointment of Liz was part of a succession plan that takes into account that three of the current Directors have been on the Board since the Company's IPO in March 2018. In light of this Graham Paterson will retire from the Board at the Annual General Meeting.

It has been a pleasure to work with Graham and the Board and I would like to thank him for his significant contribution to the Company since launch. His experience has been invaluable in shaping the Company's strategy and governance and overseeing its private company investment valuations and we wish him well for the future.

Although Sue Inglis and I were due to retire following our eighth anniversary as Directors, the Board concluded, following consultation with shareholders, that retaining our experience and continuity was preferable given the continued uncertainty caused by Saba.

Looking further ahead, Sue Inglis and I intend to step down from the Board following our ninth anniversary as Directors. While no immediate changes to the Board's composition are proposed, the Board believes that effective governance requires thoughtful and orderly succession planning to ensure continuity while refreshing the Board's skills and experience over time. Accordingly, following the 2026 Annual General Meeting, the Board will commence a formal succession planning process for our future retirements, including my succession as Chair.

The Board remains committed to maintaining an appropriate balance of independence, diversity and relevant expertise. As part of the succession planning process, the Board will review its composition to ensure it continues to meet the Company's evolving needs and reflects best practice in corporate governance. This will include consideration of the Board's compliance with the UK Listing Rules relating to ethnic diversity, alongside other aspects of diversity, recognising the benefits that a broad range of backgrounds, skills and perspectives bring to Board discussions and decision-making. The Board's objective is that at least one of the appointees to succeed Sue and me will have a non-white ethnically diverse background. As always, appointments will be made on merit, with the objective of identifying the candidates best placed to contribute to the Company's long-term success. We believe this approach will ensure the Board remains well positioned to oversee the Company in the interests of shareholders over the years ahead.

Shareholder engagement

During the period, the Board continued to engage regularly with the Company's institutional, wealth manager and retail shareholders through a range of channels, including meetings and questionnaires. The Board is grateful to all shareholders who took the time to engage and provide their views.

Feedback from institutional and wealth manager shareholders and the retail investor survey was broadly supportive and included:

•         ongoing conviction in the strategy of active investing in the best companies in America, public or private;

•         a desire for the Company to continue to invest in private companies;

•         the action on discount management is supported but shareholders appreciate the challenges of balancing private company exposure with liquidity for buybacks; and

•         satisfaction with the increased level of valuation disclosure in relation to private company investments.

The Board recognises, however, that these views are not shared by all shareholders. In particular, Saba Capital Management LP, which represents a significant proportion of the Company's share register, has expressed views that differ from those reflected in the broader shareholder feedback above. The Board has continued to engage constructively with Saba during the period and explored a number of potential ways forward. Those discussions have not resulted in an agreed course of action and, following consideration of the options available, the Board is not currently progressing the alternatives discussed. The Board will continue to have regard to the views of Saba, alongside those of the Company's wider shareholder base, in acting in the best interests of shareholders as a whole.

Annual General Meeting

It is anticipated that the Company will convene its Annual General Meeting to be held later in 2026 at the offices of Stephenson Harwood LLP in London (1 Finsbury Circus, London, EC2M 7SH). A separate circular, including the Notice of Annual General Meeting and voting instructions, will be sent to Shareholders in due course. All shareholders are encouraged to attend.

On 21 August 2026, the Company received a requisition notice from Saba Capital Management LP, requesting that the appointments of three Directors are put forward as ordinary resolutions at the 2026 Annual General Meeting. Following the requisition notice, Saba publicly stated that, should the nominated Directors be appointed, they would urge the Company to offer a 100% cash exit. Given the uncertainty over the outcome of these resolutions and the potential consequences of any subsequent cash exit, the Board has concluded that there is a material uncertainty that may cast significant doubt upon the Company's ability to continue as a going concern in its present form. This does not arise from concerns regarding the Company's current financial position or its ability to meet its existing liabilities as they fall due. The Board strongly encourages all shareholders to read the Notice of Annual General Meeting, which sets out the rationale for the Board's voting recommendations, and to vote in line with those recommendations.

Outlook

The year ahead promises significant value catalysts for the Company's portfolio, although we continue to expect periods of uncertainty and market volatility. Technology is permanently reshaping entire industries, creating opportunities for the carefully selected, high conviction companies in which we are invested across both public and private markets. Our shareholders' patient capital affords them access to the upsides of this epochal industrial transformation, and the Board is very optimistic about the prospects for further meaningful shareholder value creation from our strategy.

Thank you for your continued trust and support.

Tom Burnet
Chair
16 September 2026

Source: LSEG and relevant underlying index providers. See disclaimer on page 125.

For a definition of terms see Glossary of terms and alternative performance measures on pages 129 to 132.

Past performance is not a guide to future performance.

Managers' Review

Performance

Performance Summary (as at 31 May 2026)

As at 31 May 2026, the Company's NAV was ahead of the S&P 500 Index over one and three years. Five-year performance remained weak due to the beginning of the measurement period falling in the highly volatile COVID period.

Since inception, the Company's NAV was just ahead of the index. This is rare; the S&P 500 has been a difficult benchmark to beat. The Company's annualised NAV total return to 31 May 2026 was 16.7%. Over the same period, the Company ranked in the 15th percentile of all US equity open-ended funds, ETFs and Investment Trusts over this period (423rd out of 2,997 funds), based on a consistent total return comparison across the peer group. Against the whole Investment Trust universe, not just US, the Company sat in the 6th percentile (13th out of 250 funds).

One of the starkest themes during the year was the contrast in performance between AI infrastructure names (including the AI labs) and traditional software companies. The former performed strongly, whilst the latter were weak. This was particularly pronounced from late 2025, following the launch of Anthropic's Opus 4.5 model. This model led to a step-change in the performance of agentic coding tools like Claude Code, which caused the market to become simultaneously more bullish on AI and concerned about the durability of traditional software companies. We discuss this in the 'AI inflection point' section of this review.

As well as the difference in performance between AI infrastructure names and traditional software companies, we also saw a split between our private and public holdings. Our private holdings performed well, whilst our public names lagged the market in aggregate. This was due to our AI infrastructure weighting skewing towards the private allocation.

Four of the top five positive contributors to performance were private, led by SpaceX. Its valuation climbed through the year in the run-up to its IPO. It listed on the Nasdaq on 12 June 2026, just after the end of the reporting period. Anthropic, the AI lab, was next. We invested in its series F in August 2025 and added to the series G in February 2026. Since the start of the current calendar year its revenue run rate has increased from $9 billion to over $47 billion (more on this later). Stripe, the online payment platform, came third. Payment volumes grew 34% last calendar year across a business that now sits behind a large swathe of the digital economy, including 80% of the Nasdaq 100 and all of the top AI companies. Next came Databricks, whose cloud platform for data analytics has ridden the wave of enterprise AI adoption. The one public name in the top five was NVIDIA. It is the foundational layer of the AI build-out, and it is still accelerating. Revenues were up 85% year-on-year in its Q1 ended 26 April 2026.

The biggest detractor was Duolingo. Two issues weighed on the language learning app. User growth slowed on the back of execution missteps. Whilst disappointing, we are confident management can fix this. The market is also concerned about AI chatbot competition. We are less worried. One of the things that makes Duolingo special is its ability to motivate users to return to language learning day after day. This isn't something a general purpose chatbot can easily replicate.

Oddity Tech, the online cosmetics company, was also weak. An algorithm change at one of its advertising partners sent customer acquisition costs up sharply, leading the company to cut revenue guidance. Management is confident that it can handle the issue and return to growth, but the recovery is taking longer than expected.

Netflix held up well as a business, but the shares fell as the multiple compressed following the company's failed bid for Warner Bros. Discovery.

Real estate data company CoStar's shares also performed poorly. Part of this is lingering doubt over whether it can generate a reasonable return on the heavy investment in its home listings business, Homes.com. But part is a newer fear that its moat won't hold up in a world where AI makes software cheap and easy to build. This fear runs through a number of our software holdings. DoorDash, Samsara and Shopify have seen their multiples compress on the same worry. We think the market is being indiscriminate, tarring every software company with one brush. We explain why later.

Transactions

It was a busy year for portfolio activity. We added to our AI infrastructure allocation through new purchases of Broadcom, Alphabet, Anthropic and OpenAI, and additions to NVIDIA.

Broadcom is a leading provider of customised chips for AI inference. As the market for inference becomes more established, large AI model providers are turning to Broadcom to develop chips which are specialised for these workloads. We expect demand for compute to remain very strong and see Broadcom and NVIDIA succeeding alongside one another.

We added Alphabet back to the portfolio. When we sold five years ago, one of our concerns related to the company's culture and its ability to innovate. The rise of AI has seen the founders re-engage with the business and the pace of innovation pick up. The company's products generate vast amounts of data, giving it a structural advantage in consumer AI. Furthermore, the vertically integrated approach, which combines AI chips, cloud, models and applications, gives Alphabet the ability to optimise across the tech stack and generate cost savings.

We initiated a new holding in Anthropic. It is one of a small handful of companies whose models operate at the frontier of AI capabilities. Its products include: an AI assistant called Claude, which people use to write and do research; Claude Code, which helps software developers write and ship code; and Claude Cowork, an application for knowledge work. Anthropic is the fastest scaling software company in history and is now one of the largest holdings in the portfolio.

We took a smaller position in another frontier lab, OpenAI. It is best known for its chatbot, ChatGPT, a product which ushered in the current era of generative AI. OpenAI also sells a very powerful software development app called Codex which competes with Claude Code. We believe the opportunity in AI is vast and that there will be space for a number of companies to succeed.

Elsewhere in the technology space, we initiated new holdings in Figma and AppLovin. Figma is a design software company. We participated in the IPO. The shares have been weak since on AI concerns. We think these concerns are overdone and have outlined our thoughts in the next section.

AppLovin is a performance advertising company that enables advertisers to place adverts inside mobile games. The company has an innovative culture, led by founder Adam Foroughi, a highly profitable business model and a shareholder‑friendly capital allocation policy. We funded this new purchase through the complete sale of Roku, another advertising business, in which we had less conviction. We regularly monitor the thematic exposures in the portfolio and take these into account when deciding on sources of funding for new ideas, especially when we already have high exposure to a particular theme.

Many software names have been selling off on AI concerns. In some cases this is warranted, but for many it's an over-reaction. One such latter case is Axon Enterprise, which makes TASERs, body‑cameras and software to capture and store video and other digital evidence. We have long been admirers of this business but were reluctant to buy on valuation grounds. We initiated a holding earlier this year after the shares derated on the back of AI concerns. Axon is an infrastructure business that collects real-world data from physical devices. It is entrenched within the US police force and in our view has a highly defensible business model that is not easily replicable through AI.

Not all the purchases in the reporting period were high tech companies. On the back of the extreme volatility that we delivered during and post COVID, we have been making a conscious effort to broaden out the types of growth companies that we own in the portfolio. We have owned durable compounders in this portfolio since inception - the air conditioning, heating and refrigeration equipment distributor Watsco being a prime example - but they have comprised a relatively small percentage of the assets. Over the twelve months to 31 May 2026, we added new positions in construction materials company Knife River, medical product distributor Medline, industrial consolidator RBC Bearings and biopharmaceutical company United Therapeutics. Each of these companies meets our definition of an exceptional growth company. They address large market opportunities, possess strong competitive advantages and distinctive cultures and have the potential to deliver significant share price upside. However, they are more mature and more profitable than the average company in the portfolio.

One of the other lessons that we took from COVID was that we were too slow to act when valuations got stretched in some cases. We are long-term investors, but there are points where prices get extended, and the right thing to do is move some capital into less extended names. To this end, we now automatically revisit the upside for any public holding which has delivered a 2.5x return since its last review, regardless of the timeframe. We are not bound to act on these reviews - large share price moves can be warranted by changes in fundamentals - but we often do. Over the last financial year, we trimmed larger holdings such as Cloudflare, Shopify and DoorDash (prior to recent share price weakness).

We also reduced SpaceX. The position had grown to be over 10% of the Company's total assets. We took a significant amount of capital out of the name to manage portfolio risk but left it as our largest holding. At the time we had no knowledge that it was planning to IPO. When we gained visibility into this liquidity event, we were more content to run the holding to a larger size. SpaceX listed on the Nasdaq on 12 June 2026. At the time of writing, three lockups have been released and we have taken the opportunity to trim the position, although the holding remains large and shareholders should be aware that it has the potential to add to volatility. The remaining lockups will expire on a staggered basis, with the final lockup expected to expire 180 days post IPO.

There were several complete sales in the year. We sold long-standing advertising holding, The Trade Desk due to an extended valuation and concerns over growing competition from Amazon. We exited several small holdings which had underperformed and where we lacked the conviction to add: Airbnb, Sana Biotechnology and Ginkgo Bioworks. We sold medical device company Penumbra on the back of Boston Scientific's bid for the company. Globant, Inspire Medical Systems and Doximity were sold because our theses were broken. And Pinterest, while we continue to admire the company, we had concerns that the management team were not moving quickly enough to take advantage of the opportunities offered by AI.

Turning to the private allocation, we ended the year under review with 45.0% of the Company's assets in 27 private holdings. 16.3% of this was accounted for by SpaceX, which went public just after the year end. At the end of the prior financial year, we had 34.9% split across 27 private holdings. We added two new private companies - Anthropic and OpenAI - to the portfolio during the year. And then molecular testing company BillionToOne listed on the public market and financial software business Brex was acquired by Capital One, leaving the total number of private names unchanged.

One thing we want to flag is a slight shift in emphasis in our approach to private companies. In the just over eight years since IPO, we have found that, in general, we have done better when we have invested in larger and more established names than those at the earlier end of the spectrum. We therefore continue to favour our capital allocation in the direction of more established companies. By established, we mean businesses which are already generating significant revenues, not necessarily those which are profitable. Our biggest winners - SpaceX, Stripe, Anthropic - were all unprofitable when we first invested and therefore setting a profitability threshold would not be in shareholders' interests.

The next section outlines our thoughts on AI. This is an increasingly important theme for the portfolio. The Company's allocation to AI infrastructure has significantly increased over the last year. There has also been broad weakness in software names due to concerns about AI's potential impact on their market opportunities and competitive positions.

AI inflection point

In late 2025, AI models crossed a new threshold. We have been bullish on AI for some time, but what happened has caused us to revise our assumptions upward. We now think AI will have a large impact on the economy much earlier than we previously expected.

Large language models (LLMs) like those built by Anthropic and OpenAI are trained on large quantities of text to predict the next word in a sequence of words. In doing so, they develop internal representations of language, logic and knowledge that turn out to be surprisingly general. This was the breakthrough that led to ChatGPT. These early models could write fluently and answer questions, which made them effective as chatbots. However, they struggled to hold a plan in mind over many steps, couldn't recover from mistakes and were limited in their ability to use external tools.

Two innovations changed this. The first was chain‑of-thought reasoning, which launched with OpenAI's o1 model. Rather than blurting out an answer, reasoning models could tackle problems step-by-step, which made them much better at hard logic problems like maths and coding. The second was tool use, which let models act in the digital world by writing code, searching the web, reading and writing files and controlling software. Together these enabled AI systems to work autonomously. They could take a goal, break it down into sub-tasks, write code to solve the task, check the output and iterate until the job was done. This is what is meant by 'agents' and 'agentic AI'.

Agents were unreliable until recently. Then something changed in November last year when Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5. This new model brought together these capabilities at a level that surprised almost everyone in the field. The benchmarked performance of Opus 4.5 was good, but the step change in capabilities went beyond what was measurable in benchmarks. The model was outstanding at coding in a way that the standard benchmarks didn't capture. Previously if you'd set an application like Claude Code on a coding task it was hit-or-miss. Now it was far more capable. The model could sustain autonomous coding sessions for 30-minutes-plus, navigating complex multi-file codebases, debugging its own errors and producing code good enough to push into production.

Since then, the models have only grown more capable. The same skills that made them good at writing code have made them formidable in finding vulnerabilities in it. Anthropic's latest model, Mythos, was so good at cybersecurity that the company initially released it only to a select group of corporate partners. The consumer version of this model, called Fable, was released in June with security guardrails in place, but it was subsequently pulled after the US government issued an export control directive due to concerns about the robustness of these guardrails. Fable is now generally available again. A separate OpenAI cyber incident also highlighted the risks of increasingly capable models operating beyond intended safeguards. Together these incidents highlight both the growing power of these models and also the geopolitical risks that this power brings.

The CEO of one of our software companies told us he had his aha moment in December 2025. It was near year end and his engineers finally had some time to experiment. A few of them suddenly became more productive - "10x engineers became 50-100x engineers". He estimates the company is seeing 50% productivity gains in R&D and 20% in sales.

Most of the traditional benchmarks have done a poor job of capturing this recent advancement but there is one that has done a better job than most. An independent research group called METR has been tracking AI agent capabilities by measuring the length of tasks a model can complete autonomously, benchmarked against how long those tasks take a skilled human. Three years ago, leading-edge models could complete, with a 50% success rate, only tasks that took skilled humans around four minutes; today, they can achieve the same success rate on tasks that take humans roughly twelve hours. The pace is accelerating, too. From 2019 to 2024 task duration was doubling every seven months. It then accelerated to every three months. And the latest points on the curve indicate a doubling every two months.

In the old paradigm, a user inputs some text, and the model generates a response. In this 'one shot' system, compute consumption is relatively modest, running into a few hundred or maybe a few thousand tokens. Agents work differently. This time the query is a goal, for example 'find the bug that's causing the page to crash', and then the model enters a loop. It reasons about where the bug might be, reads the code, forms a hypothesis, writes a fix, runs tests and checks the results. If it fails, it runs the loop again. Each loop requires a fresh pass through the model. A task that takes an agent half an hour might loop dozens of times, consuming hundreds of thousands of tokens. A single agent session can burn through more compute than a thousand chatbot queries.

We are already seeing this come through in our portfolio companies. At a recent conference, the founder-CEO of a large ecommerce software company told us that some of his engineers are now spending more on AI tokens than their annual compensation, and the return on investment on these tokens exceeds the return on their comp. "The number of tokens will be infinite. There's just so much to do. We're not producing even a basis point of the tokens we should". He wants to eliminate middle management by year end because his best engineers should be "managing fleets of agents" rather than people. We hear the same message again and again. One software infrastructure CEO told us that fully deploying coding agents across his engineering team would lift consumption 25 to 50 times. These companies are at the leading edge. Where they go, others will follow.

The effects of this inflection are already evident in the revenues of the frontier labs. Claude Code is the vehicle through which many developers experienced this. Anthropic's revenues have scaled from a $9 billion annual run rate (ARR) at the end of 2025 to over $47 billion as of May 2026. The company has added almost $40 billion of ARR revenue year-to-date. For context the entire SaaS (software as a service) industry tends to add around $2 billion of net new ARR each quarter. Growth of this scale is unprecedented.

The hyperscalers have responded to this acceleration in demand. Capital expenditure from the largest five is now expected to be over $750 billion this calendar year, up well over 50% year-on-year, with about three quarters of this going on compute. To put this into context, the Apollo program cost just over $300 billion in today's money, and that was spread out over more than a decade. All of the hyperscalers report that AI capacity is being absorbed as fast as it can be deployed. Going back a year or two we were concerned that we might hit an air pocket in the medium term. We no longer have this concern. Given the recent agentic shift, it now seems likely that AI demand will remain undersupplied for years.

The recent demand spike on the back of agentic AI has mostly been in the domain of software development. It's likely this will spread to other domains. The capabilities that made coding agents possible are general. The same model that can debug a complex piece of code can also read financial filings and build a model, read a legal contract and flag risks or plan a logistics route. Each new domain requires fine-tuning and new tools, but both of these things are being built at speed.

OpenClaw

In January, a software engineer asked an AI agent to buy him a car. The agent searched dealer inventories, filled out contact forms using his phone number and email and then spent several days playing dealers off against each other, forwarding competing PDF quotes and asking each one to beat the other's price. The final price was thousands less than list. The engineer just had to step in and sign.

The agent was OpenClaw, an open-source project (formerly Clawdbot) that went viral earlier this year. OpenClaw is a locally hosted AI model that connects to messaging apps like WhatsApp and can autonomously manage email, calendars, files and commands on a user's machine. There are hundreds of stories like the car negotiation. One of the scariest developments was an agent social network called Moltbook, where almost a million autonomous agents signed up and were interacting with each other. More agents means more compute.

NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang said it's "definitely the next ChatGPT". Another CEO went further and called it "the most important thing anyone has ever created". He's personally spending $12,000 per week on tokens to run OpenClaw at home.

OpenClaw is still very rough. There are huge security risks in giving an agent unfettered access to your digital life. But the demand for a personal assistant that can act on your behalf and save you money and time is clearly enormous. And this is, again, an incredibly computationally intensive version of AI. We are going to need a lot of compute.

OpenAI acquihired the solo developer behind this project, Peter Steinberger. Anthropic has been working fast to ship the components that make up OpenClaw such as the ability to dispatch a task from your phone and run it autonomously on your computer or the ability for the model to take complete control of your computer operating system and apps.

The cloud computing transition was big, amounting to several hundred billion dollars per year, but it was ultimately bounded by the size of the existing IT workloads that were being shifted from on-premise servers. AI is much more transformational. Instead of migrating existing compute workloads, agents are augmenting and, in some cases, substituting human labour. The scale of the market opportunity is in the trillions rather than hundreds of billions. And if agents are more efficient than people at certain tasks, the total volume of work done could grow rather than just shift from one cost line, human capital, to another. GDP growth itself could accelerate. US productivity growth has already picked up from a 1.4% ten-year average to 2.7% last year. Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson thinks AI is partly responsible.

If he's right, we could see faster GDP growth and software spending consuming a much larger share of it. The question is which software companies will capture that spending.

Not all software is equal

Agentic AI triggered a large selloff in public software stocks. Agents like Claude Code have dramatically lowered the barriers to producing software. All other things equal, this will raise the competitive intensity of the industry and eat away at moats. The market is also concerned about business model risk. Many software companies generate revenue via seat-based pricing. If AI replaces people, seat-based revenue shrinks. Companies may be able to adapt by shifting their business models towards consumption, but this isn't straightforward and customers will likely resist. Moreover, SaaS companies have been richly valued partly on account of their dependability. They generate recurring revenues and customers churn infrequently, leading to highly predictable long-duration cashflows. But predictable cashflows are also the most vulnerable when investors start pricing in uncertainty.

A large swathe of our software holdings were caught up in this sell-off. Given the above, some caution is warranted, but we think the market is being overly indiscriminate. There is a crucial difference between application software, the software that people open and use, and those that provide the infrastructure for other software to run on, the gates and rails. The former carries more risk, whilst the market opportunity for the latter could actually increase in a world of agents because agents need infrastructure too. Businesses that interface with the physical world tend to sit on the safe side of the line as well. What matters is whether these companies have the will to adapt. Pleasingly, we see this in most of our holdings. We have long favoured founder-led businesses, and it is at times like these that the attributes of an effective founder-leader are most valuable.

For example, Shopify has been positioning its business to benefit from agentic commerce. The company provides infrastructure for commerce. It's the operating system through which merchants manage their business. As and when commerce switches from people shopping for things to agents doing it on their behalf, those agents will still need all of the functionality that Shopify supplies like checkout, inventory management, shipping, taxes, returns handling and subscriptions. Founder-CEO Lütke thinks that half of all ecommerce will ultimately be handled by agents.

Cloudflare is another of our software infrastructure names which stands to benefit. AI has made writing software dramatically cheaper, so the number of new applications is exploding, and those apps need to be deployed somewhere. Cloudflare has been rapidly adding functionality to its Workers service to position it as the default hosting platform for AI agents and vibe-coded applications. The company is also strategically positioned with regards to agent traffic, with 20% of the web sitting behind it. It has launched AI Crawl Control to enable content owners to monitor agents and charge them for access, a critical service for websites which have historically monetised via advertising and need a new revenue model as agent traffic substitutes for human eyeballs. Finally, Cloudflare benefits from the sheer volume of agent activity on the web. If humans looked at a few sites when making a decision, an agent might look at thousands. In January, weekly agent requests more than doubled across its network, driving demand for its core security, performance and networking services.

Most of our large software holdings fall into the infrastructure category. Stripe, Databricks, Snowflake. They provide the infrastructure upon which the digital economy runs. Their revenue models are also already consumption based. With the right leadership, agents ought to be an opportunity for these companies, rather than a threat.

We are also relaxed about the holdings in our portfolio which bridge the digital and physical divide - for example restaurant delivery company DoorDash, industrial internet-of-things company Samsara and new holding Axon. These companies have defensibility due to the large quantities of data they collect from physical assets.

The application software companies have bigger question marks. Figma, the design platform, is facing head-on competition from the foundational model companies. However, we remain confident in its ability to navigate this change and emerge as a winner. Design is an area that benefits from specialisation and Figma's founder Dylan Field is an outstanding CEO who has been driving the company to innovate rapidly and lean into the opportunities created by AI. For example, the company released a new app called Figma Make where customers can turn design concepts and text descriptions into web apps and interactive prototypes. We believe that, in a world with lots more software, design will become even more important, and the granular control that Figma offers designers will be complementary to the generative capabilities that have been unlocked with AI.

Workday is another example of an application company whose business model could be pressured by AI. It's a classic seat-based SaaS business. Its founder, who hadn't been running the company for several years, has just returned. Workday is a broad, horizontal solution and lacks the deep proprietary data moat that vertical SaaS businesses benefit from. It is a system of record and isn't easy to rip-and-replace, but we are more cautious on this stock than our other software names and have been reducing our holding.

Lots of chips

One of the puzzling things about recent events is that NVIDIA's share price hasn't reacted much to these developments. In our view agentic AI is very bullish for compute demand. And yet, at the time of writing, NVIDIA's share price is trading just over 10% above the level it reached in November, before Opus 4.5 was released. It seems inconsistent to us that the market would be so bullish on AI as to mark down the prices of many software names and yet indifferent to the implications for NVIDIA.

NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang corroborated this bullish view on a recent podcast with Lex Fridman. He made a couple of comments on the podcast, one direct and one indirect, that indicate he believes NVIDIA could ultimately be a $3 trillion revenue business. That's trillion. Revenues this year* are forecast to be $390 billion. His argument is that NVIDIA's revenue is not constrained by market share in a fixed market. It is determined by the size of new markets that AI creates. Revenue for NVIDIA is a function of the number of tokens generated. As AI shifts from chatbots to autonomous agents, and from a single domain like coding to every knowledge work domain in the economy, the volume of tokens the world needs grows by orders of magnitude.

One thing which could hold back revenue growth is deflation. NVIDIA has improved system‑level performance by a millionfold over the last decade. However, demand has still grown meaningfully. And there are no signs of this ending. We consistently hear from portfolio companies that, whilst token costs are falling, usage is growing faster. This is Jevons' Paradox.

Jensen's paradox is a company sustaining hyper‑growth while trading on cheaper and cheaper multiples. As of early September 2026, the stock is trading on 25x current year earnings. It is on a far lower PE than Costco (45x) and Walmart (37x) and is growing many times faster. Indeed, the company expects to grow revenues by 70% next year, and if it wasn't for supply constraints this number would be closer to 100%.

The strongest bear case is that we've seen this before. Technology investment moves in cycles. Transformational demand can be real and still get pulled forward, leading to a capex overshoot and a painful correction. The fibre optic buildout of the late 90s was necessary. The world did need all that bandwidth. But the companies that laid the cable still went bankrupt because supply overshot demand by several years. Could the same thing happen with AI? It's possible. A recession that tightened enterprise budgets could cause the hyperscalers to reduce their spending plans, and NVIDIA's growth would decelerate sharply. We take the risk seriously. But the demand picture today is different from even twelve months ago. The agentic shift has moved AI from something discretionary to a productivity tool with measurable return on investment, with existential implications for companies that fail to embrace it.

Outlook

Our philosophy has not changed. We aim to identify and own the exceptional growth companies in America: businesses that address large market opportunities, possess durable competitive advantages and distinctive cultures and have the potential to deliver significant share price upside. That has been our task since inception, and it remains so.

What has changed is how we go about it. The last eight years, and the volatility we delivered during and after COVID in particular, have taught us some lessons, and we have been applying them. We have broadened the types of growth company we own, adding more mature, more profitable and less correlated names such as Knife River, Medline, RBC Bearings and United Therapeutics alongside our faster-growing holdings. We are paying closer attention to portfolio construction and balance, and we now manage position size and portfolio shape more proactively. We automatically revisit the upside on any public holding that has delivered a 2.5x return, and we trim when prices get extended, as we did with Cloudflare, Shopify and DoorDash. The aim is a portfolio that can deliver strong long-term returns with less of the volatility that has characterised it in the past.

The enhancements we have made will not protect performance in every eventuality and they are not designed to. This Company is for investors seeking exposure to exceptional growth businesses who are willing to accept variability of returns in pursuit of long-term compounding. Increasingly, many of the world's most valuable companies are choosing to remain private for longer, with a significant proportion of their value creation occurring before they reach the public markets. We have a large 'off‑index' position in private companies and would also caution, again, that SpaceX, our largest holding, whilst now public, remains largely under lockup and has the potential to add to volatility.

The other big change this year was AI. The events of the last twelve months have convinced us that AI will affect the economy sooner, and more profoundly, than we had assumed, and we have evolved the portfolio to reflect that. We own much of the infrastructure being built to meet this demand: the chips, the clouds, the frontier labs and the rails that agents will run on. We are more cautious on the application software most exposed to commoditisation but think that the market is being overly pessimistic on software businesses that provide infrastructure for other software or that interface with the physical world.

A final word on our own confidence. We are bullish, but it would be foolish to hold too precise a view on how AI's deployment will unfold. We are confident about the direction; we are humble about the path. Adoption will not run in a straight line, and we should expect ups and downs in the fundamentals, and sharper ones still in sentiment, with moments when the two point in opposite directions. None of this troubles us greatly. We are long-term investors. Our aim is to back the exceptional companies on the right side of this change and to be patient with them. Through this lens, our conviction in the portfolio is as high as ever.

US Equity Growth Team
Baillie Gifford & Co
16 September 2026

Source: LSEG, Morningstar and relevant underlying index providers. See disclaimer on page 125.

* The comparative index is the S&P 500 Index total return (in sterling terms).

For a definition of terms see Glossary of terms and alternative performance measures on pages 129 to 132.

Past performance is not a guide to future performance.

Purpose and investment principles

Baillie Gifford US Growth Trust aims to deliver above average long‑term returns for shareholders by keeping fees and costs low and harnessing the long‑term growth potential of companies.

Our purpose

Baillie Gifford US Growth Trust aims to find, own and support the most exceptional public and private growth companies in America.

We believe that our investment approach of long termism, embracing asymmetry and broad perspective gives us an advantage in uncovering exceptional growth companies. Our opportunity set is wide given the Company's structure means we can invest in exceptional growth companies regardless of their listed status.

Exceptional growth companies address huge market opportunities at an early stage, possess a sustainable competitive edge and enjoy powerful and effective cultures that enable them to realise their long‑term potential. We believe such companies contribute to productive innovation in society and, over the full course of time, these companies will develop deep competitive moats and generate abnormal profits and unusually high shareholder returns.

We endeavour to generate returns for our shareholders by helping in the creation and improvement of such useful enterprises. If we are successful in identifying these companies, we believe that we can multiply our shareholders' wealth over the long term.

Our investment principles

Managing shareholders' money is a huge privilege and not one we take lightly. It is a relationship, not a transaction. Relationships can only be built on a foundation of trust and understanding. With this in mind, we seek to lay out the fundamental principles by which we will manage your money and the framework for how we make decisions so that you, our shareholders, can decide whether it aligns with your investment philosophy.

•         We believe the fundamental measure of our success will be the value we create for our shareholders over the long term. It is only over periods of five years or more that the characteristics we look for in businesses become apparent. Our turnover has been low, consistent with our time horizon. We ask that our shareholders measure our performance over similar periods.

•         Short-term volatility is an inevitable feature of the market, and we will not manage the portfolio to reduce volatility at the expense of long‑term gain. Many managers are risk‑averse and fear loss more than they value gain. Therefore, they accept smaller, more predictable risks rather than the larger and less predictable ones. We believe that this is harmful to long‑term returns, and we will not shy away from making investments that are perceived to be risky if we believe that the potential payoffs are worthwhile. This means that our performance may be lumpy over the short term.

•         We believe, and academic work has shown, that long‑term equity returns are dominated by a small handful of exceptional growth companies that deliver outsized returns. Most stocks do not matter for long‑term equity returns, and investors will be poorly served by owning them. In our search for exceptional growth companies, we will make mistakes. But the asymmetry inherent in equity markets, where we can make far more in a company if we are right than lose if we are wrong, tells us that the costliest of mistakes is excessive risk aversion.

•         We do not believe that the index is the right starting point for portfolio construction. The index allocates capital based on size. We believe that capital should be allocated based on marginal return and the ability to grow at those rates of return. Big companies are not immune to disruption. We do not manage the portfolio to an active share target, but we expect the active share of the Company to be high.

•         We are largely indifferent to a company's private or public status. We will conduct diligent analysis and allocate capital to where the highest risk‑adjusted returns are likely to be.

•         We believe our duty is to maximise the long‑term wealth of our shareholders, and that placing emphasis on short‑term performance serves our shareholders poorly.

•         We will endeavour to operate in the most efficient, honest and economical way possible. That means keeping our ongoing costs including management fees low. We recognise that even modest amounts, when allowed to compound over long periods of time, add up to staggering sums, and we do not wish to dilute the compounding of returns with the compounding of costs.

With this foundation, we aim to build Baillie Gifford US Growth Trust into a world‑class savings vehicle. We are grateful that you have joined us on this journey, and we look forward to a long and hopefully prosperous relationship with you.

Baillie Gifford's stewardship principles

Baillie Gifford's overarching ethos is that we are 'Actual' investors. That means we seek to invest for the long term. Our role as an engaged investor is at the core of our mission to be effective stewards for our clients. As an active manager, we invest in companies at different stages of their evolution across many industries and focus on their unique circumstances and opportunities. Our approach favours a small number of simple principles rather than overly prescriptive policies. This helps shape our interactions with holdings and ensures our investment teams have the freedom and retain the responsibility to act in clients' best interests.

Long-term value creation

We believe that companies that are run for the long term are more likely to be better investments over our clients' time horizons. We encourage our holdings to be ambitious, focusing on long‑term value creation and capital deployment for growth. We know events will not always run according to plan. In these instances we expect management to act deliberately and to provide appropriate transparency. We think helping management to resist short‑term demands from shareholders often protects returns. We regard it as our responsibility to encourage holdings away from destructive financial engineering towards activities that create genuine value over the long run. Our value will often be in supporting management when others do not.

Alignment in vision and practice

Alignment is at the heart of our stewardship approach. We seek the fair and equitable treatment of all shareholders alongside the interests of management. Assessing alignment with management often comes down to intangible factors and an understanding built over time. We look for clear evidence of alignment in everything from capital allocation decisions in moments of stress to the details of executive remuneration plans and committed share ownership. We expect companies to deepen alignment with us, rather than weaken it, where the opportunity presents itself.

Governance fit for purpose

Corporate governance is a combination of structures and behaviours; a careful balance between systems, processes and people. Good governance is the essential foundation for long‑term company success. We firmly believe that there is no single governance model that delivers the best long‑term outcomes. We therefore strive to push back against one‑dimensional global governance principles in favour of a deep understanding of each company we invest in. We look, very simply, for structures, people and processes which we think can maximise the likelihood of long‑term success. We expect to trust the boards and management teams of the companies we select, but demand accountability if that trust is broken.

Sustainable business practices

A company's ability to grow and generate value for our clients relies on a network of interdependencies between the company and the economy, society and environment in which it operates. We expect holdings to consider how their actions impact and rely on these relationships. We believe long‑term success depends on maintaining a social licence to operate and look for holdings to work within the spirit and not just the letter of the laws and regulations that govern them. Material factors should be addressed at the board level as appropriate.

Review of investments

A review of the Company's ten largest investments and additions to the private company investments as at 31 May 2026.

Top ten holdings

Space Exploration Technologies^U

An aerospace and space transportation company that manufactures advanced rockets, like the Falcon 9, and satellites, like Starlink, which provides global broadband services. We are excited by its pursuit of reduced launch costs through its ambitious Starship programme, thus opening avenues for growth, such as data centres in space. A clear segment leader, it looks positioned to capture an out-sized share of the growing space industry, while Starlink may become the first globally relevant utility.

Stripe^U

Stripe is a payments technology company. Founded in 2010 by Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison, the company is in the process of developing a platform for sending money seamlessly and compliantly between any two internet connected nodes in the world. The company processes massive volumes of payments from a broad customer base, ranging from US start-ups to global giants. Stripe's long-term ambition is to make entrepreneurship easier and thus significantly increase the amount of business conducted online.

NVIDIA

NVIDIA designs and manufactures graphics processing units. They are specialised semiconductor chips that can be used for a range of applications, from gaming to AI. After years of investment into both hardware and software, NVIDIA is well positioned to benefit from the rise of generative AI, as its chips form the infrastructure layer to power large language models. NVIDIA is using its scale to further reinvest in its opportunity, designing new hardware to make data centres more powerful and energy efficient, while building software to help companies adopt AI more quickly.

Anthropic^U

Anthropic is a leading AI company. It is one of a small handful of companies whose models operate at the frontier of AI capabilities. Anthropic's founding principle was that AI should be safe and capable at the same time. The company does a lot of research on how to make AI systems honest, reliable and easy to control. This safety-focussed approach has resonated strongly with enterprise customers. The company's products include: an AI assistant called Claude, which people use to write and do research; Claude Code, which helps software developers write and ship code; and Claude Cowork, an application for knowledge work. The company is the fastest scaling software company in history. Its annualised revenues crossed $47 billion in May this year, just over five years after its founding.

Amazon

In retail, Amazon competes on price, selection and convenience and is improving all three as it gets bigger. Amazon's AWS (Amazon Web Services) division is in a clear position of leadership in what could turn out to be one of the largest and most important market shifts of our time. Both opportunities are outputs of what is perhaps most distinctive of all about Amazon - its culture. The company is run with a uniquely long-term perspective. It is willing to be bold and scale its experiments (and failures) as it grows. These cultural distinctions allow Amazon to possess the rare and attractive combination of scale and immaturity.

Databricks^U

Databricks provides a unified data and AI platform that helps enterprises store, manage and analyse data while building machine learning applications. As AI adoption accelerates, the company is well positioned to benefit by simplifying the entire data science workflow and making advanced AI capabilities accessible to a broader range of businesses. Its open-source roots have driven strong adoption, product innovation and ecosystem development, enabling Databricks to offer an increasingly integrated platform. The ability for customers and partners to share data, models and tools strengthens its competitive position. Founded by leading UC Berkeley researchers, Databricks combines deep technical expertise with a culture of continuous innovation. Its close ties to academia and open-source communities support ongoing product improvement and reinforce its leadership in the rapidly growing data and AI infrastructure market.

Cloudflare

Cloudflare is a global cloud platform that provides security, performance and reliability services to millions of websites and internet applications. Founded in 2009, the company began as a web security provider and has since evolved into a broad edge computing platform. Cloudflare's network spans over 300 cities worldwide, putting 95% of the global internet population within 50 milliseconds of its infrastructure. Cloudflare is uniquely positioned to play a foundational role in the AI infrastructure stack. Its global, low‑latency network enables efficient inference at the edge, while its developer platform, Workers, supports AI-powered applications with minimal overhead. This positions Cloudflare as a key enabler of distributed AI - a fast‑growing opportunity as real-time use cases proliferate.

Meta Platforms

Meta Platforms is a leading digital advertising and social media company led by founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose long-term orientation and willingness to invest ahead of demand have built one of the most valuable franchises in technology. Meta owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, a family of apps used by billions of people every day, which gives it an advertising business of remarkable scale. Its tools target and price advertising with growing precision, helping the company sustain advertising revenue growth above 20% and win a rising share of global marketing budgets. Meta is now investing heavily in the infrastructure and engineering talent to extend that advantage, a substantial commitment that reflects the scale of the opportunity it sees. As businesses concentrate more spending on the platforms that reach their customers most effectively, Meta's depth of engineering, breadth of user data and sheer reach position it as a key beneficiary.

Broadcom

Broadcom, a leading semiconductor company led by CEO Hock Tan, whose disciplined capital allocation has helped build one of the industry's strongest franchises. Broadcom is a leader in Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), customised chips that deliver superior performance and efficiency for specialised workloads, including AI inference. As demand for AI infrastructure grows, hyperscalers are increasing investment in compute capacity and increasingly seeking customised chip solutions. Broadcom's engineering expertise, scale and deep customer relationships position it as a key beneficiary of this trend. We believe the opportunity for custom AI chips is significantly larger than widely recognised, and Broadcom is uniquely placed to support the next generation of AI infrastructure, creating a compelling long-term growth opportunity.

Shopify

Shopify provides software tools which allow merchants to easily set up and manage their businesses across an increasingly complex and fragmented retail landscape. Shopify's software helps to make merchants more efficient by automating large swathes of their operations (e.g. marketing, inventory management, payments, order processing, shipping) thus allowing them to focus on product market fit. The company maintains a rapid pace of innovation and is run by an impressive founder who has built a distinctive merchant focussed culture.

Private company new buys

Anthropic^U

Anthropic is a leading AI company. It is one of a small handful of companies whose models operate at the frontier of AI capabilities. Anthropic's founding principle was that AI should be safe and capable at the same time. The company does a lot of research on how to make AI systems honest, reliable and easy to control. This safety-focussed approach has resonated strongly with enterprise customers. The company's products include: an AI assistant called Claude, which people use to write and do research; Claude Code, which helps software developers write and ship code; and Claude Cowork, an application for knowledge work. The company is the fastest scaling software company in history. Its annualised revenues crossed $47 billion in May this year, just over five years after its founding.

OpenAI^U

OpenAI is a leading AI company. It is one of a small handful of companies whose models operate at the frontier of AI capabilities. The company is best known for ChatGPT, the AI assistant now used by hundreds of millions of people to write, code, search, learn and reason through problems. Alongside ChatGPT, OpenAI has built tools for image generation, video generation, and software development. The company was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit with the mission of ensuring capable AI benefits humanity as a whole. That origin still shapes its governance: OpenAI now consists of the non-profit OpenAI Foundation and for-profit OpenAI Group, a public benefit corporation governed by the Foundation. The company has grown rapidly since its founding, and now generates tens of billions of run rate revenues, reflecting the scale of the market opportunity that the company addresses.

^U    Denotes private company investment.

Portfolio executive summary

Key contributors to and detractors from performance - year to 31 May 2026

U   Denotes private company investment.

P   Denotes listed investment previously held in the portfolio as a private company investment.

*   Contribution to absolute performance (in sterling terms) has been calculated to illustrate how an individual stock has contributed to the overall return. It is influenced by both share price performance and the weighting of the stock in the portfolio, taking account of any purchases or sales over the period.

†   Absolute performance (in sterling terms) has been calculated on a total return basis over the period 1 June 2025 to 31 May 2026. For the definition of total return see Glossary of terms and alternative performance measures on pages 129 to 132. Table ordered by contribution to performance.

Source: Revolution.

Distribution of total assets* by sector 2026

Source: Baillie Gifford/LSEG and relevant underlying index providers. See disclaimer on page 125.

*   For a definition of terms see Glossary of terms and alternative performance measures on pages 129 to 132.

Baillie Gifford - valuing private companies

We hold our private company investments at 'fair value' i.e. the price that would be paid in an open‑market transaction. Valuations are adjusted both during regular valuation cycles and on an ad hoc basis in response to 'trigger events'. Baillie Gifford's valuation process ensures that private companies are valued in both a fair and timely manner.

The valuation process is overseen by a valuations group at Baillie Gifford, which takes advice from an independent third party (S&P Global). The valuations group is independent from the investment team with all voting members being from different operational areas of the firm, and the portfolio managers only receive final notifications once they have been applied.

Baillie Gifford revalues the private holdings on a three‑month rolling cycle, with one third of the holdings reassessed each month. During stable market conditions, and assuming all else is equal, each investment would be valued four times in a twelve‑month period. The valuations are also reviewed twice per year by the Board, which receives copies of Baillie Gifford's proposed valuations as well as the latest valuation reports from its external valuer. The valuations are subject to the scrutiny of the Company's external auditor in the annual audit process.

Beyond the regular cycle, the valuations team also monitors the portfolio for certain 'trigger events'. These may include: changes in fundamentals; a takeover approach; an intention to carry out an Initial Public Offering ('IPO'); company news which is identified as material by the valuation team or by the portfolio managers; or meaningful changes to the valuation of comparable public companies. Any ad hoc change to the fair valuation of any holding is implemented swiftly and reflected in the next published net asset value.

The valuations group also monitors relevant market indices on a weekly basis and updates valuations in a manner consistent with Baillie Gifford's external valuer's (S&P Global) most recent valuation report where appropriate.

Periods of market volatility during the period have meant that valuations continued to be reviewed much more frequently, in some instances resulting in further valuation movements.

The data below quantifies the revaluations carried out during the twelve months to 31 May 2026, but does not reflect the ongoing monitoring of the private investment portfolio which did not result in a change in valuation.

The simple average movement in company valuations and share prices across the portfolio in the twelve months to 31 May 2026 are shown below. The valuations of our private company holdings increased by more than the corresponding movement in share prices over the period on average. This reflects the fact that Baillie Gifford typically holds preference stock, which provides downside protection but may participate less fully in upside valuation increases than ordinary equity. The share price movement reflects a probability-weighted average of both the regular valuation, which would be realised in an IPO, and the downside protected valuation, which would normally be triggered in the event of a corporate sale or liquidation. As a result, increases in headline company valuations may not be fully reflected in share prices where the expected value continues to incorporate the downside protected outcome.

*   Data reflecting period 1 June 2025 to 31 May 2026 to align with the Company's reporting period end.

Private companies summary

Historical snapshot

Since our first investment in private companies in 2018, Baillie Gifford US Growth has deployed £286 million of capital in this area.

Portfolio activity - year to 31 May 2026

£30.3m of new capital was deployed in private companies during the year.

Subsequent to the period end on 12 June 2026, Space Exploration Technologies listed.

†   Brex was acquired by Capital One during the year ended 31 May 2026, with the resulting Capital One holding sold before the year-end.

Concentration

At 31 May 2026 we held 27 (2025: 27) private companies which equated to 45.0% (2025: 34.9%) of total assets.

•         The five largest private companies accounted for 78.1% (2025: 62.5%) of the private company exposure.

•         The ten largest private companies accounted for 88.3% (2025: 79.4%) of the private company exposure.

Size

Our private company exposure tends to be weighted to the upper end of the maturity curve, focussed on late stage private companies which are scaling up and becoming profitable.

List of investments

as at 31 May 2026

*   Total assets less current liabilities, before deduction of borrowings. See Glossary of terms and alternative performance measures on pages 129 to 132.

†   See Glossary of terms and alternative performance measures on pages 129 to 132.

#   Includes holdings in ordinary shares, preference shares and convertible promissory notes.

U   Denotes private company investment.

P   Denotes listed investment previously held in the portfolio as a private company investment.

The comparative column only shows instruments still held at 31 May 2026.

Past performance is not a guide to future performance.

Principal and emerging risks

As explained on pages 77 and 78 there is an ongoing process for identifying, evaluating and managing the risks faced by the Company on a regular basis. The Directors have carried out a robust assessment of the principal and emerging risks facing the Company, including those that would threaten its business model, future performance, regulatory compliance, solvency or liquidity. During the year the Audit Committee, in conjunction with the Board and the Manager, undertook a full review of the Company's risk map including the mitigating factors and controls to reduce the impact of the risks. The Committee continues to closely monitor these risks along with any other emerging risks as they develop and implements mitigating actions as necessary. A description of these risks and how they are being managed or mitigated is set out on pages 55 to 58.

During the year, as part of its preparations for the enhanced internal controls reporting requirements under Provision 29 of the 2024 UK Corporate Governance Code and Provision 34 of the 2024 AIC Code, the Board reviewed the Company's principal and emerging risks and the material controls in place to manage or mitigate those risks. Following this review, the Board concluded that ESG risk, leverage risk and political and associated economic risk should no longer be presented as standalone principal risks. The Board continues to monitor these matters, but considers them to be factors which may influence or exacerbate other principal risks, in particular financial risk, investment strategy risk and emerging risk, rather than discrete principal risks in their own right. Leverage continues to be monitored through the Company's financial risk, liquidity, covenant and stress-testing controls. ESG matters continue to be considered through the Managers' investment, stewardship and engagement processes. Political, geopolitical and macroeconomic developments continue to be monitored as part of the Board's review of market conditions, portfolio risk and emerging risks. Further information on the Board's approach to risk management and internal controls, including the Company's preparations for the enhanced reporting requirements under Provision 29 of the 2024 UK Corporate Governance Code and Provision 34 of the 2024 AIC Code, is set out in the Internal controls and risk management section on pages 78 and 79.

The Board considers the heightened macroeconomic and geopolitical concerns to be factors which exacerbate existing risks, rather than discrete risks, within the context of an investment trust. Their impact is considered within the relevant risks.

Promoting the success of the Company (section 172 statement)

Under section 172 of the Companies Act 2006, the directors of a company must act in the way they consider, in good faith, would be most likely to promote the success of the company for the benefit of its members as a whole, and in doing so have regard (amongst other matters and to the extent applicable) to: a) the likely consequences of any decision in the long term; b) the interests of the company's employees; c) the need to foster the company's business relationships with suppliers, customers and others; d) the impact of the company's operations on the community and the environment; e) the desirability of the company maintaining a reputation for high standards of business conduct and; f) the need to act fairly as between members of the company.

In this context and having regard to Baillie Gifford US Growth being an externally‑managed investment company with no employees, the Board considers that the Company's key stakeholders are its existing and potential new shareholders, its externally‑appointed Managers (Baillie Gifford) and other key professional service providers (corporate broker, registrar, Auditor, Custodian and Depositary), lenders, portfolio companies, AIC/industry peers, investment platforms, wider society and the environment.

The Board considers that the interests of the Company's key stakeholders are aligned, in terms of wishing to see the Company deliver sustainable long‑term growth, in line with the Company's stated objective and strategy, and meet the highest standards of legal, regulatory and commercial conduct, with the differences between stakeholders being merely a matter of emphasis on those elements.

The Board's methods for assessing the Company's progress in the context of its stakeholders' interests are set out on the following pages.

The Board approaches all key decision making with the interests of the Company and all its shareholders as the priority.

Key decisions

In addition to ensuring that the Company's stated investment objective was being pursued, key decisions and actions during the year to 31 May 2026 which required the Directors to have regard to applicable section 172 factors included:

•         Share buybacks

          The Company bought back 4,505,000 of its own shares into treasury at a discount to net asset value, for subsequent reissue. Over the year, the discount narrowed significantly, moving from 9.4% to 0.1%. The Company's buyback strategy takes into account a broad range of factors, carefully considering and balancing the positives (in particular, providing shareholders with additional liquidity for their shares on terms that enhance net asset value for remaining shareholders) and any negatives (in particular, the impact on portfolio composition and diversification), as well as having regard to shareholder feedback regarding discount management.

•         Shareholder engagement and marketing

          The Board conducted regular meetings with shareholders during the year to seek their feedback and understand their views. During the year the Company hosted an Annual General Meeting providing shareholders with the opportunity to engage directly with the Board and the Managers. A Q&A session was held allowing shareholders to raise questions and receive detailed responses. The Board encourages shareholders to attend the 2026 Annual General Meeting. The Board continues to utilise digital platforms, including the Company website, to disseminate timely information and updates. Through these initiatives, the Board has strengthened its relationship with shareholders, ensuring their voices are heard and considered in the Company's strategic decision-making process. The Board remains committed to maintaining regular, open and transparent communication with all shareholders.

          The Company is part of a marketing programme which includes all the investment trusts managed by Baillie Gifford & Co Limited. The marketing strategy has an ongoing objective to stimulate demand for the Company's shares. The Board has committed to an annual marketing budget of £400,000 (see note 4 to the Financial Statements on page 107). The cost of this marketing strategy is borne in partnership by the Company and the Managers with the Managers matching the Company's contribution. The Board is keen to enhance its relationship with existing shareholders by keeping them informed, and engaged with the Company's activities and performance, whilst also attracting new investors.

          The Board recognises the challenges involved in reaching retail shareholders and continues to assess how best to interact with this element of the Company's shareholder base. To help address this and to further inform Board decision-making, a retail investor survey was issued in March 2026. The survey provided valuable feedback on a range of themes, including discount management, performance and returns, communication and transparency, support for the current long-term investment approach and views on private company exposure. The Board considered the feedback carefully as part of its ongoing discussions on strategy, shareholder engagement, communications and the management of the Company's discount.

•         Shareholder activism

          During the year, the Board devoted significant time and attention to addressing the challenges arising from Saba Capital Management LP's ('Saba') position as a significant shareholder. The Board sought to identify constructive solutions capable of balancing the differing interests of shareholders, including preserving the opportunity for those wishing to retain long-term exposure to the Company's investment strategy while providing a meaningful exit opportunity for those seeking to realise their investment. To this end, the Board considered in detail a range of potential corporate actions and put forward a number of possible solutions in its engagement with Saba. None of these received Saba's support and, given the significance of Saba's shareholding, the Board concluded that they could not practicably be progressed. The options considered included a potential merger with Edinburgh Worldwide Investment Trust plc, with the Company as the continuing vehicle, which the Board believed could have provided a constructive and pragmatic solution for both companies and their respective shareholders. The proposed merger progressed to heads of terms but was not taken forward after Saba indicated that it would not support the transaction. No material costs were incurred by the Company in exploring the potential merger. Throughout its consideration of these and other options, the Board carefully managed the costs incurred, recognising that any proposal progressed to implementation would, where required, be subject to shareholder approval. The Board's objective throughout was to seek a fair balance between the interests of different shareholder groups and to act in the best interests of shareholders as a whole.

•         Board performance

          In a commitment to uphold the highest standards of corporate governance and enhance board performance, the Board undertook a performance evaluation during the year. This was aimed at providing an objective assessment of the Board's effectiveness and identifying areas for improvement. By addressing the identified areas for improvement, the Board aims to further enhance its governance practices and better serve the interests of shareholders. The Board is committed to maintaining transparency, accountability and excellence in governance. More information on the evaluation process can be found on page 77.

•         Board composition

          The Board continued to review its composition, succession planning and effectiveness during the year, with a focus on maintaining the appropriate balance of skills, experience, independence and diversity to support the long-term success of the Company. Further information on the Board's approach to diversity, including its objectives and the considerations informing Board appointments, is set out in the Board Diversity section on page 76. Following the prior year, during which the Board had noted that it was actively reviewing its composition and succession planning, the Board progressed this work through the appointment of Ms Flockhart as a Director of the Company. Fletcher Jones, an external search consultancy, was used in the appointment of Ms Flockhart as a non-executive Director. Fletcher Jones has no other connection with the Company or the Directors. The Board considered the appointment to be in the best interests of shareholders as a whole, strengthening the Board's ability to provide independent judgement, constructive challenge and effective stewardship of the Company. Ms Flockhart will be subject to election by shareholders at the forthcoming Annual General Meeting.

Employees, human rights and community issues

The Board recognises the requirement to provide information about employees, human rights and community issues. The Company has no employees. All its Directors are non‑executive and all its functions are outsourced. There are, therefore, no disclosures to be made in respect of employees, human rights and community issues.

Board representation

At 31 May 2026 the Board comprised five Directors, three male and two female. The Company had no employees. The Board's policy and disclosures on diversity are set out on page 76.

Environmental, social and governance policy

Details of the Company's policy on socially responsible investment can be found under 'Corporate governance and stewardship' on page 81 and the Managers' approach to stewardship and examples of portfolio company engagement are set out on pages 20 to 24.

The Company considers that it does not fall within the scope of the Modern Slavery Act 2015 and it
is not, therefore, obliged to make a slavery and human trafficking statement. In any event, the Company considers its supply chains to be of low risk as its suppliers are typically professional advisers. A statement by the Managers under the Act has been published on the Managers' website
at bailliegifford.com.

Future developments of the Company

The outlook for the Company for the next year is set out in the Chair's statement on pages 7 to 10 and in the Managers' review on pages 11 to 19.

The Strategic report which includes pages 7 to 64 was approved by the Board on 16 September 2026.

Tom Burnet
Chair

Responsibility statement of the Directors in respect of the Annual Financial Report

We confirm that, to the best of our knowledge:

•         the Financial Statements, which have been prepared in accordance with applicable law and United Kingdom Accounting Standards (United Kingdom Generally Accepted Accounting Practice) including FRS 102 'The Financial Reporting Standard applicable in the UK and Republic of Ireland', give a true and fair view of the assets, liabilities, financial position and net return of the Company;

•         the Annual Report and Financial Statements taken as a whole is fair, balanced and understandable and provide the information necessary for shareholders to assess the Company's performance, business model and strategy; and

•         the Strategic report and Directors' report include a fair review of the development and performance of the business and the position of the Company, together with a description of the principal risks and uncertainties that it faces.

On behalf of the Board
Tom Burnet
16 September 2026

Income statement

For the year ended 31 May

The total column of this statement is the profit and loss account of the Company. The supplementary revenue and capital return columns
are prepared under guidance published by the Association of Investment Companies.

All revenue and capital items in this statement derive from continuing operations.

A Statement of Comprehensive Income is not required as all gains and losses of the Company have been reflected in the above statement.

The accompanying notes on pages 103 to 121 are an integral part of the Financial Statements.

Balance sheet

As at 31 May

The Financial Statements of Baillie Gifford US Growth Trust plc (Company Registration number 11194060) were approved and authorised for issue by the Board and were signed on 16 September 2026.

Tom Burnet
Chair

*        Net asset value per ordinary share after deducting borrowings at book value. See Glossary of terms and alternative performance measures on pages 129 to 132.

The accompanying notes on pages 103 to 121 are an integral part of the Financial Statements.

Statement of changes in equity

For the year ended 31 May 2026

For the year ended 31 May 2025

The accompanying notes on pages 103 to 121 are an integral part of the Financial Statements.

Cash flow statement

For the year ended 31 May

*   Cash from operations includes dividends received of £563,000 (2025 - £449,000) and interest received of £95,000 (2025 - £159,000).

The accompanying notes on pages 103 to 121 are an integral part of the Financial Statements.

Notes to the Financial Statements

Baillie Gifford US Growth Trust plc was incorporated under the Companies Act 2006 in England and Wales as a public limited company with registered number 11194060. The Company is an investment company within the meaning of section 833 of the Companies Act 2006 and carries on business as an investment trust.

1.       Principal accounting policies

The Financial Statements for the year to 31 May 2026 have been prepared in accordance with FRS 102 'The Financial Reporting Standard applicable in the UK and Republic of Ireland' and on the basis of the accounting policies set out below which are unchanged from the prior year and have been applied consistently.

2.       Income

3.       Investment management fee

Details of the Investment Management Agreement are set out on page 69. The annual management fee is 0.70% on the first £100 million of net assets, 0.55% on the next £900 million of net assets and 0.50% on the remaining net assets. Management fees are calculated and payable quarterly.

4.       Net return per ordinary share

Revenue return per ordinary share is based on the net revenue loss after taxation of £7,162,000 (2025 - net revenue loss after taxation of £7,312,000) and on 277,835,028 (2025 - 288,178,084) ordinary shares, being the weighted average number of ordinary shares in issue (excluding treasury shares) during each period.

Capital return per ordinary share is based on the net capital profit for the financial period of £233,724,000 (2025 - net capital profit after taxation of £142,673,000) and on 277,835,028 (2025 - 288,178,084) ordinary shares, being the weighted average number of ordinary shares in issue (excluding treasury shares) during each period.

Total return per ordinary share is based on the total profit for the financial period of £226,562,000 (2025 - total profit of £135,361,000) and on 277,835,028 (2025 - 288,178,084) ordinary shares, being the weighted average number of ordinary shares in issue (excluding treasury shares) during each period.

There are no dilutive or potentially dilutive shares in issue.

5.       Ordinary dividends

There are no dividends paid or proposed in respect of the financial year. There is no net revenue available for distribution by way of dividend for the year to 31 May 2026 due to the revenue loss of £7,162,000 in the year (2025 - revenue loss of £7,312,000).

6.       Fixed assets - investments

*   The investments in preference shares are not classified as equity holdings as they include liquidation preference rights that determine the repayment (or multiple thereof) of the original investment in the event of a liquidation event such as a take‑over.

†   The Abiomed CVR (see 'Contingent value rights' on page 132 for details) had a fair value of nil at 31 May 2026 and 31 May 2025.

During the year to 31 May 2026 investments with a book cost of £8,262,000 (31 May 2025 - no investments) were transferred from Level 3 to Level 1 on becoming listed. Investments in securities are financial assets held at fair value through profit or loss. In accordance with FRS 102, the tables above provide an analysis of these investments based on the fair value hierarchy described below, which reflects the reliability and significance of the information used to measure their fair value.

Fair value hierarchy

The fair value hierarchy used to analyse the fair values of financial assets is described below. The levels are determined by the lowest (that is the least reliable or least independently observable) level of input that is significant to the fair value measurement for the individual investment in its entirety as follows:

Level 1 -     using unadjusted quoted prices for identical instruments in an active market;

Level 2 -     using inputs, other than quoted prices included within Level 1, that are directly or indirectly observable (based on market data); and

Level 3 -     using inputs that are unobservable (for which market data is unavailable).

The valuation techniques used by the Company are explained in the accounting policies on pages 105 and 106. A sensitivity analysis by valuation technique of the unlisted securities is given on pages 116 to 119.

7.       Transaction costs

Transaction costs of £27,000 (2025 - £18,000) and £37,000 (2025 - £18,000) were suffered on purchases and sales respectively.

8.       Borrowing facilities

At 31 May 2026 there were drawings of US$25 million at an interest rate of 5.47% on the unsecured US$25 million three-year revolving credit facility with ING Bank N.V., London Branch which matures on 30 July 2026 (2025 - US$25 million at an interest rate of 5.90%). At 31 May 2026 there were drawings of US$25 million at an interest rate of 5.03% on the unsecured US$25 million three-year revolving credit facility with Royal Bank of Scotland International Limited which matures on 18 October 2026 (2025 - US$25 million at an interest rate of 5.63%). Subsequent to the year end on 30 July 2026 the US$25 million three‑year revolving credit facility with ING Bank N.V., London Branch and the US$25 million three‑year revolving credit facility with Royal Bank of Scotland International Limited maturing on 18 October 2026 were refinanced with a new unsecured US$50 million three‑year revolving credit facility from Royal Bank of Scotland International Limited.

The main covenants relating to the loans in place during the year to 31 May 2026 are that borrowings should not exceed 30% of the Company's adjusted net asset value or adjusted portfolio value and the Company's minimum adjusted net asset value or adjusted portfolio value shall be £140 million. The adjusted net asset value and adjusted portfolio value calculations include the deduction of 100% of the value of any unlisted securities. There were no breaches in the loan covenants during the year to 31 May 2026 (31 May 2025 - none).

9.       Analysis of change in net debt

10.     Share capital

In the year to 31 May 2026, the Company issued no shares (2025 - nil).

Over the period from 1 June 2026 to 14 September 2026 the Company has issued no shares.

The Company's authority to buy back shares up to a maximum of 14.99% of the Company's issued share capital was renewed at the Annual General Meeting held on 2 October 2025. In the year to 31 May 2026, 4,505,000 shares with a nominal value of £45,050 were bought back at a total cost of £11,921,000 (2025 - 16,000,000 shares with a nominal value of £160,000 were bought back at a total cost of £35,504,000) and held in treasury. At 31 May 2026 the Company had authority to buy back 40,949,570 ordinary shares.

Over the period from 1 June 2026 to 14 September 2026 no shares were bought back and held in treasury.

11.     Transactions with related parties and the Managers and Secretaries

The Directors' fees and shareholdings are detailed in the Directors' remuneration report on pages 85 to 88. No Director has a contract of service with the Company. During the period no Director was interested in any contract or other matter requiring disclosure under section 412 of the Companies Act 2006.

Baillie Gifford & Co Limited has been appointed as the Company's Alternative Investment Fund Managers and Company Secretaries. Details of the terms of the Investment Management Agreement are set out on page 69 and details of the fees during the period are shown in note 3.

The financial information set out above does not constitute the Company's statutory accounts for the year ended 31 May 2026 or the year ended 31 May 2025 but is derived from those accounts. Statutory accounts for the year to 31 May 2025 have been delivered to the Registrar of Companies, and those for the year to 31 May 2026 will be delivered in due course. The auditor has reported on the accounts for the year to 31 May 2026; the report was (i) unqualified, (ii) did include a reference to a matter to which the auditor drew attention by way of emphasis without qualifying their report and (iii) did not contain a statement under section 498 (2) or (3) of the Companies Act 2006.

The Annual Report and Financial Statements is published on the Company website bgusgrowthtrust.com‡. The audited Annual Report and Financial Statements will be posted to shareholders during September 2026 and will be delivered to the Registrar of Companies in due course. A copy of the annual financial report will be submitted shortly to the National Storage Mechanism ('NSM') and will be available for inspection at the NSM, which is situated at https://data.fca.org.uk/#/nsm/nationalstoragemechanism.

‡         Neither the contents of the Company website nor the contents of any website accessible from hyperlinks on the Company website (or any other website) is incorporated into, or forms part of, this announcement.

Glossary of terms and alternative performance measures ('APM')

An alternative performance measure ('APM') is a financial measure of historical or future financial performance, financial position or cash flows, other than a financial measure defined or specified in the applicable financial reporting framework. The APMs noted below are commonly used measures within the investment trust industry and serve to improve comparability between investment trusts.

Total assets

This is the Company's definition of adjusted total assets, being the total value of all assets held less all liabilities (other than liabilities in the form of borrowings).

Shareholders' funds and net asset value

Shareholders' funds is the value of all assets held less all liabilities, with borrowings deducted at book cost. Net asset value ('NAV') is the value of all assets held less all liabilities, with borrowings deducted at either fair value or book value as described below. Per share amounts are calculated by dividing the relevant figure by the number of ordinary shares in issue.

Borrowings at book value

Borrowings are valued at adjusted net issue proceeds. The value of the borrowings at book is set out on page 121.

Borrowings at fair value (APM)

Borrowings are valued at an estimate of their market worth. The value of the borrowings at fair is set out on page 121.

Net asset value (reconciliation of NAV at book value to NAV at fair value)

Net liquid assets

Net liquid assets comprise current assets less current liabilities (excluding borrowings).

Discount/premium (APM)

As stock markets and share prices vary, an investment trust's share price is rarely the same as its NAV. When the share price is lower than the NAV per share it is said to be trading at a discount. The size of the discount is calculated by subtracting the NAV per share from the share price and is usually expressed as a percentage of the NAV per share. If the share price is higher than the NAV per share, it is said to be trading at a premium.

Total return (APM)

The total return is the return to shareholders after reinvesting any dividend on the date that the share price goes ex‑dividend. The Company does not pay a dividend, therefore, the total returns for the share price and NAV per share are the same as the percentage movements in the share price and NAV per share as detailed on page 26.

Ongoing charges (APM)

The total recurring expenses (excluding the Company's cost of dealing in investments and borrowing costs) incurred by the Company as a percentage of the average net asset value (with debt at fair value).

*   Non-recurring expenses in the year to 31 May 2026 amounted to £60,000. These were the residual costs incurred in connection with the requisitioned general meeting held on 3 February 2025.

Turnover (APM)

Annual turnover is a measure of portfolio change or trading activity in a portfolio. Turnover is calculated as the minimum of purchases and sales in a month, divided by the average market value of the portfolio, summed to get rolling twelve month turnover data.

Gearing (APM)

At its simplest, gearing is borrowing. Just like any other public company, an investment trust can borrow money to invest in additional investments for its portfolio. The effect of the borrowing on the shareholders' assets is called 'gearing'. If the Company's assets grow, the shareholders' assets grow proportionately more because the debt remains the same. But if the value of the Company's assets falls, the situation is reversed. Gearing can therefore enhance performance in rising markets but can adversely impact performance in falling markets.

Net gearing is the Company's borrowings at book value less cash and cash equivalents (including any outstanding trade settlements) expressed as a percentage of shareholders' funds.

Gross gearing is the Company's borrowings expressed as a percentage of shareholders' funds.

Leverage (APM)

For the purposes of the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Regulations, leverage is any method which increases the Company's exposure, including the borrowing of cash and the use of derivatives. It is expressed as a ratio between the Company's exposure and its net asset value and can be calculated on a gross and a commitment method. Under the gross method, exposure represents the sum of the Company's positions after the deduction of sterling cash balances, without taking into account any hedging and netting arrangements. Under the commitment method, exposure is calculated without the deduction of sterling cash balances and after certain hedging and netting positions are offset against each other.

Active share (APM)

Active share, a measure of how actively a portfolio is managed, is the percentage of the portfolio that differs from its comparative index. It is calculated by deducting from 100 the percentage of the portfolio that overlaps with the comparative index. An active share of 100 indicates no overlap with the index and an active share of zero indicates a portfolio that tracks the index.

Treasury shares

The Company has the authority to make market purchases of its ordinary shares for retention as treasury shares for future reissue, resale, transfer or cancellation. Treasury shares do not receive distributions and the Company is not entitled to exercise the voting rights attaching to them.

Private (unlisted) company

An unlisted or private company means a company whose shares are not available to the general public for trading and are not listed on a stock exchange.

Contingent value rights

'CVR' after an instrument name indicates a security, usually arising from a corporate action such as a takeover or merger, which represents a right to receive potential future value, should the continuing company achieve certain milestones. The Abiomed CVR arose on Johnson & Johnson's takeover of Abiomed. The milestones relate to the performance of the technologies acquired through the takeover. Any value attributed to this holding reflects both the amount of the future value potentially receivable and the probability of the milestones being met within the time frames in the CVR agreement.

Third party data provider disclaimer

No third party data provider ('Provider') makes any warranty, express or implied, as to the accuracy, completeness or timeliness of the data contained herewith nor as to the results to be obtained by recipients of the data.

No Provider shall in any way be liable to any recipient of the data for any inaccuracies, errors or omissions in the index data included in this document, regardless of cause, or for any damages (whether direct or indirect) resulting therefrom. No Provider has any obligation to update, modify or amend the data or to otherwise notify a recipient thereof in the event that any matter stated herein changes or subsequently becomes inaccurate.

Without limiting the foregoing, no Provider shall have any liability whatsoever to you, whether in contract (including under an indemnity), in tort (including negligence), under a warranty, under statute or otherwise, in respect of any loss or damage suffered by you as a result of or in connection with any opinions, recommendations, forecasts, judgements or any other conclusions, or any course of action determined, by you or any third party, whether or not based on the content, information or materials contained herein.

S&P Index Data

The S&P 500 Index ('Index') is a product of S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC, a division of S&P Global, or its affiliates ('SPDJI'), and has been licensed for use by Baillie Gifford & Co. and S&P500^® is a registered trademark of S&P Global, Inc. or its affiliates ('S&P'); Dow Jones^® is a registered trademark of Dow Jones Trademark Holdings LLC ('Dow Jones'); and these trademarks have been licensed for use by SPDJI and sub-licensed for certain purposes by Baillie Gifford & Co. Baillie Gifford & Co Product(s) are not sponsored, endorsed, sold or promoted by SPDJI, Dow Jones, S&P, their respective affiliates and none of such parties make any representation regarding the advisability of investing in such product(s) nor do they have any liability for any errors, omissions, or interruptions of the S&P 500 Index.

FTSE Index data

London Stock Exchange Group plc and its group undertakings (collectively, the 'LSE Group'). © LSE Group 2026. FTSE Russell is a trading name of certain of the LSE Group companies. 'FTSE^®' 'Russell^®', 'FTSE Russell^®', is/are a trade mark(s) of the relevant LSE Group companies and is/are used by any other LSE Group company under license. All rights in the FTSE Russell indexes or data vest in the relevant LSE Group company which owns the index or the data. Neither LSE Group nor its licensors accept any liability for any errors or omissions in the indexes or data and no party may rely on any indexes or data contained in this communication. No further distribution of data from the LSE Group is permitted without the relevant LSE Group company's express written consent. The LSE Group does not promote, sponsor or endorse the content of this communication.

Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation ('SFDR')

The EU Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation ('SFDR') applies to third-country products marketed in the EU. As Baillie Gifford US Growth is marketed in the EU by the AIFM, Baillie Gifford & Co Limited, via the National Private Placement Regime ('NPPR'), the following disclosures have been provided to comply with the high-level requirements of SFDR.

The AIFM has adopted Baillie Gifford & Co's stewardship principles and guidelines as its policy on integration of sustainability risks in investment decisions. More detail on the Managers' approach to sustainability can be found in the stewardship principles and guidelines document, available publicly on the Baillie Gifford website at bailliegifford.com and by scanning the QR code below. The underlying investments do not take into account the EU criteria for environmentally sustainable economic activities established under the EU Taxonomy Regulation.

END