The VanEck Semiconductor ETF, trading under the ticker SMH, has climbed 30% over the past month after falling 13% between the end of January and the end of March. It is now up 40% year to date, a sharp reversal for a fund that was caught in the market’s February-to-March pullback.
The rebound comes after Amazon, Alphabet, Meta and others said in February they expected enormous capital spending in 2026 to build out artificial intelligence infrastructure. That announcement helped fuel a wave of investor panic that wiped out $1 trillion in AI stocks in short order, even as March brought fresh market chaos tied to the Iran war. SMH offers a one-ticker way to own the chip trade without betting on a single company, and its holdings include Nvidia, Taiwan Semiconductor, Broadcom and Micron, plus 16 others. The fund’s average lifetime annual return is 26.92% a year, with a three-month average volume of 9.2 million shares and an expense ratio of 0.35%.
That mix keeps the ETF squarely tied to the companies building the hardware behind artificial intelligence. Nvidia’s graphics processing units are used by just about every AI software company, Taiwan Semiconductor controls 72% of the total pure foundry market, and Micron makes the HBM4 memory chip for Nvidia’s Vera Rubin GPU. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing alone accounts for 10.5% of SMH’s portfolio.
About 78% of the fund’s holdings are based in the United States, while the remaining 22% is dominated by the Netherlands and Taiwan. That geographic split gives SMH exposure to a supply chain that is still heavily centered on a handful of critical names, even after the recent snapback. For investors looking at semiconductors as a whole, the current move suggests the market has not abandoned the trade; it has simply become more willing to buy it after a hard reset. For a separate look at that debate, see Smh Stock: Why semiconductor investors still may not be in a bubble.
