Soxx’s rival, the iShares Semiconductor ETF SOXX, returned 190.03% over the one-year stretch ended June 3, 2026, topping SOXQ’s 181.74% gain over the same period. The gap was small, but it showed how much a handful of chip giants and the funds’ construction can matter when the AI trade is running hot.
Investors looking at Soxx are searching for the same reason they were a year ago: semiconductors have been one of the market’s most crowded winning trades, and the benchmark numbers keep moving higher. SOXQ closed at $109.58 on June 3 and was up 96.71% year to date, after crossing $1 billion in assets under management in February. Its 0.19% expense ratio and its track record as a cleaner, lower-cost route into semiconductor stocks keep it in the comparison set with larger peers.
SOXQ tracks the PHLX Semiconductor Sector Index, which holds the 30 largest U.S.-listed semiconductor companies. That structure has made the fund highly sensitive to a few AI accelerator leaders, and the top 10 holdings accounted for 59% of assets as of February. NVIDIA, Broadcom, Advanced Micro Devices and Micron were identified as the dominant positions, which meant the fund’s performance was driven less by breadth than by a narrow group of winners.
NVIDIA was the clearest example. The company faced an anticipated $8 billion hit from U.S. chip-export restrictions to China, but hyperscaler demand from Microsoft, Amazon and Google helped offset the lost revenue and kept the stock pushing the fund higher. Broadcom also benefited as its custom ASIC business for hyperscalers and networking silicon plugged directly into the data-center build-out, while AMD entered mid-2026 with a 168.31% 12-month gain and server CPU market share above 40% in April.
The unresolved issue for investors is not whether the semiconductor rally has been real; it has. The question is how much of SOXX’s 190.03% return, and SOXQ’s close second-place showing, came from the names inside the funds and how much came from fees and index design. For now, the answer is that a fraction of a percentage point in cost and a different index can still leave a measurable mark, even in a rally as broad as the AI chip boom.
