President Trump said Intel and Apple had agreed to develop and manufacture chips in the U.S., while soxx rose 12.6% in June and was up 88% in 2026. The iShares Semiconductor ETF’s gains came from a broad move in semiconductor shares, not just one company.
SOXX and the June surge
The ETF aims to track the NYSE Semiconductor Index, which holds the 30 largest U.S.-listed semiconductor companies and caps the top five at 8% and the rest at 4%. That structure kept the fund from leaning too hard on any single name even as Nvidia and Broadcom declined in June.
As of July 2, Micron Technology and Advanced Micro Devices represented slightly more than 8% of the ETF, while Nvidia accounted for 7.5% and Intel was about 6.2%. Those weights helped the fund capture gains from several parts of the sector at once.
Micron and capital spending
The ETF also benefited from semiconductor capital-spending stocks in June, including Applied Materials and KLA Corp. The move was reinforced by the need for AI chips and the spending required to make them, which pushed capital equipment shares higher.
Micron Technology added another lift after reporting blockbuster third-quarter earnings. Management said, “broadly speaking, the overall aggregate supply is substantially below the aggregate demand for both DRAM and NAND. Of course, DRAM is extremely, extremely constrained. HBM is very constrained. All the segments are seeing those challenges,” and also said, “We're also going to increase substantially capex next year,” with fiscal capital spending set to rise to $27 billion in fiscal 2026 from $15.9 billion in 2025.
Trump's chip claim
President Trump’s statement about Intel and Apple sat alongside the ETF’s market move, but neither company had said the deal was real as of the article. That left the stock-picking lesson intact for investors in the iShares Semiconductor ETF: the fund was not powered by one headline, but by multiple holdings reacting to spending, supply and AI demand at the same time.
Wall Street analysts penciled in $44 billion, and the ETF’s weight-capped design kept that kind of sector strength flowing across more than the biggest chip name. Investors tracking SOXX were buying exposure to a broad semiconductor rally, not a single-company bet.
