- 1Y return
- +71.1%
- Fund size
- $67.42B
- As of Jul 17, 2026
- Expense ratio
- 0.35%
- Sponsor disclosed
- Inception
- Dec 20, 2011
Sep 1, 2025–Aug 31, 2026VanEck source ↗
Living public-equity thesis
AI Supercycle
AI is a capital-spending supercycle whose value capture migrates across bottlenecks. The durable edge is not predicting one permanent winner; it is tracking which layer is constrained, whether utilization and customer economics justify the next round of capacity, and when new supply turns scarcity into commoditization.
Thesis under reviewDelayed market data
Market close · Aug 31, 2026
Thesis v0.1 · 2026-07-17
Thesis conditions and falsifiers
What must hold
- — Training and inference demand must grow fast enough to absorb continuing gains in hardware and model efficiency.
- — At least one physical or silicon bottleneck must remain scarce enough to support pricing, utilization, or backlog visibility.
- — Customers must translate deployed compute into productivity, revenue, strategic advantage, or defensible option value.
- — Capital providers must continue funding long-duration infrastructure before the full application revenue pool is visible.
What breaks it
- — Utilization or order visibility weakens across multiple layers while committed capacity continues to arrive.
- — Model efficiency and open alternatives reduce compute intensity faster than new workloads expand it.
- — Power, permitting, financing, or customer concentration leaves material infrastructure stranded.
- — Application economics fail to support the cost of the underlying compute stack over a full investment cycle.
ETF scorecard
Own the sectors, not the forecast.
Five liquid expressions of the AI infrastructure trade, compared with broad U.S. equities and the Nasdaq-100. Funds are the unit of analysis; individual-stock selection stays off this page.
Return window
Choose one period for the full scorecard and detail chart.
Showing 3 of 5 funds · funds without the full 1Y window are omitted
- 1Y return
- +89.0%
- Fund size
- $45.06B
- As of Jul 17, 2026
- Expense ratio
- 0.34%
- Sponsor disclosed
- Inception
- Jul 10, 2001
Sep 1, 2025–Aug 31, 2026iShares source ↗
- 1Y return
- +126.8%
- Fund size
- $838.58M
- As of Jul 17, 2026
- Expense ratio
- 0.75%
- Sponsor disclosed
- Inception
- Dec 3, 2024
Sep 2, 2025–Aug 31, 2026VistaShares source ↗
Choose ETF
Selected ETF · Index
SMH versus the benchmarks
VanEck Semiconductor ETF. Rebased to 0% at the start of the selected window so unlike share prices remain directly comparable.
SMHVOOQQQSep 1, 2025–Aug 31, 2026
Window rules. 7D and 30D are the trailing 7 and 30 calendar days. Annual windows use exact calendar anniversaries and the first observed close on or after the cutoff.
Relative return. Fund and benchmark compound from the same start window; unavailable histories are omitted, never backfilled.
Data. Adjusted close is preferred. The live view uses delayed provider history.