The Semiconductor ETF's 2026 Return Is About 3 Times Nvidia's

The VanEck Semiconductor ETF (NASDAQ:SMH) is having a huge 2026. As of midday on Sept. 30, the fund sat near $608 a share, up about 69% from its $360.13 close on the last trading day of 2025. This leaves it well ahead of the S&P 500 (SNPINDEX:^GSPC).

Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA), the fund's top holding at about 19% of assets as of Sept. 29, has risen too, but nowhere near as much.

The artificial intelligence (AI) chip leader's stock traded around $230 as of this writing, about 23% over its $186.50 year-end close. Put another way, the fund has returned about three times as much as its biggest position this year.

I think this gap says more about how a chip fund is built than about Nvidia. About four-fifths of the fund's money is in other chip stocks, and this year, most of the gain came from them.

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Three stocks powered almost half the gain

Showing how uneven the year's been, Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU) shares have climbed around 276% in 2026, Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) shares about 223%, and Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) shares about 181%.

As of Dec. 24, 2025, Nvidia was around 21% of the fund's assets, while Micron and AMD each made up about 5% and Intel about 4%. By my rough math, if the fund had kept these weights all year, Micron, AMD, and Intel alone would account for about 32 percentage points of its 69% gain. Nvidia would account for only around 5 points.

That means almost half the gain came from about 14% of the money.

The fund's weights change with every quarterly rebalance, so this is just an estimate. But it's within a point of the fund's actual gain.

Meanwhile, Broadcom, around 8% of the fund at the end of 2025, is up only about 2% this year. And of the 23 other stocks the fund owns now that traded in the U.S. all year, over two-thirds have beaten Nvidia.

Nvidia's business kept accelerating

The gap isn't about Nvidia's results. Revenue in the chipmaker's fiscal second quarter of 2027 (the period ended July 26, 2026) surged 106% year over year to $96.2 billion. Growth has been accelerating all year, too, from 73% in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026 to 85% in the three months after that.

The bigger difference is where each company started. Nvidia entered 2026 worth around $4.5 trillion, a price that arguably already assumed years of fast growth. Micron was worth around $320 billion -- and then its business saw a memory boom.

Micron's revenue hit $41.5 billion for its fiscal third quarter of 2026 (the period ended May 28, 2026), over four times the $9.3 billion it posted a year earlier. Intel's turnaround showed in its numbers, too. Its revenue dropped 4% year over year in the fourth quarter of 2025, then climbed 25% in the second quarter of 2026.

Said another way, much of the fund's gain came from companies whose results changed the most from where they were a year earlier. Nvidia's market value, around 14 times Micron's as 2026 started, is now under five times Micron's.

Why not just own Nvidia?

The fund also limits how big any one position can get. It tracks the MVIS US Listed Semiconductor 25 Index, which weights its stocks by market value but caps any single stock at 20% when it rebalances quarterly.

Nvidia's weight had drifted to around 24% as of Sept. 3. After the September rebalance, it was back to around 19% as of Sept. 29.

This cap is part of why the fund could beat Nvidia by so much. Yet it also means the fund depends on the whole industry, including its most cyclical areas.

Micron, which posts fiscal fourth-quarter results after today's close, is still around 5% of the fund. And memory prices can drop as fast as they've climbed.

In the end, the fund's edge isn't a knock on Nvidia. Nvidia shares trade at around 15 times next fiscal year's expected earnings, which I see as a fair price for a business whose revenue just rose 106%. The gap simply shows that a chip fund is a bet on the whole industry, with its top name capped at about a fifth of it.

For investors who want to own chip stocks without trying to pick next year's winner, I'd lean toward the fund over any one chipmaker. It just comes with the industry's cyclical names right beside its leaders.

Daniel Sparks and his clients do not have positions in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Advanced Micro Devices, Broadcom, Intel, Micron Technology, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.