Semiconductor stocks are going gangbusters in mid-2026, with the benchmark Invesco PHLX Semiconductor ETF (ticker: SOXQ) up 99% year to date. The exchange-traded fund is easily outperforming the broader tech sector (up 21.5% over the same timeframe).
What’s behind the blockbuster performance? Mostly the artificial intelligence chip demand escalation, which has driven industry stalwarts like Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), among others, to new heights this year. After semiconductor stocks languished in the first quarter, a massive mid-April to late-May wave has pushed the entire industry higher. In the past three months, the SOXQ ETF returned over 58% as big tech outfits like Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and Oracle Corp. (ORCL) placed huge orders for advanced chips to run their AI data centers, transferring billions to the semiconductor industry.
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A case in point: From April 2025 to April 2026, global semiconductor sales rose 93.9%, from $56.9 billion to $110.5 billion, according to the Washington-based Semiconductor Industry Association. That growth should roll on, as World Semiconductor Trade Statistics estimated 2026 industry sales growth at 90%, rising to $1.5 trillion globally.
“Global semiconductor sales increased on a month-to-month basis for the 14th consecutive month in April, and the global market continues to notch robust year-to-year growth driven by sales into the Asia-Pacific region, the Americas and China,” notes John Neuffer, SIA president and CEO. “Meanwhile, the global semiconductor industry is projected to hit $1.5 trillion in sales in 2026 — reaching that milestone earlier than previously expected — fueled by increasing demand for AI infrastructure and accelerated computing platforms.”
As the AI boom continues to shift toward its implementation phase, chip stock experts say they’re seeing greater emphasis on institutional adoption of the technology, with firms looking to level up their data resources to accommodate the sheer power of AI models in their operations. That process is well underway, to the delight of big technology stock investors.
“It’s certainly worth investors maintaining a higher interest in the AI companies that are providing the industry’s ‘picks and shovels,’ as more organizations seek to level up their adoption rates,” says Ivan Marchena, senior economist at Just2Trade. “This means that players like Nvidia, Broadcom, TSMC, Lam Research and Cadence could provide better long-term prospects for investors.”
With plenty of candidates in play, who’s sitting at the top of the semiconductor stock pile right now and has the momentum to keep rising for the rest of the year? These companies are a good place to start:
| Semiconductor Stock | Implied 12-Month Performance* | YTD Return |
| KLA Corp. (KLAC) | -20.9% | 111.6% |
| Micron Technology Inc. (MU) | -5.2% | 281.4% |
| Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) | 47.7% | 14.1% |
| Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) | -7.0% | 155.5% |
| Broadcom Inc. (AVGO) | 34.2% | 14.1% |
| Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSM) | 7.1% | 46.0% |
| Credo Technology Group Holding Ltd. (CRDO) | 2.8% | 80.3% |
*Based on share price as of June 16 and TipRanks’ consensus price target tables.
KLA Corp. (KLAC)
This Milpitas, California-based semiconductor process control and yield management company is posting huge gains in 2026, with its share price up 112% so far this year and 47% in the past month alone. Credit robust quarterly results, with the company clocking in with an adjusted earnings per share of $9.40 on $3.42 billion for the quarter ending in March. That beat analyst expectations of $9.17 per share on sales of $3.37 billion.
On June 11, KLA’s C-suite followed through on its May 7 call for a 10-for-1 forward stock split on its common shares, in an effort to boost liquidity and expand its already-growing retail investor base. Under the terms of the split, each stockholder of record at the market close on June 4 received nine additional shares for each share held after the close of trading on June 11. “This stock split is intended to improve the accessibility and liquidity of KLA shares, while maintaining consistency with our long?term capital allocation strategy,” says KLA Chief Financial Officer Bren Higgins.
Wall Street analysts loved the move, with 16 of 21 technology analysts placing a “buy” recommendation on KLAC shares, and five choosing a “hold,” even as they expected a temporary dip in the stock price to allow the dust to settle from the 10-for-1 split.
Micron Technology Inc. (MU)
This Boise, Idaho-based innovative memory and storage solutions provider remains smoking hot in June, with its share price up 281% year to date and up 804% over the past year. The company is benefiting from massive demand for AI memory and central processing units, which continues to boost the DRAM channel, where growth rates have just extended into their 12th consecutive cycle.
As Micron noted after presenting at the Computex 2026 trade conference, AI workloads are increasingly expanding from training to large-scale inference, including reasoning-heavy and agent-based systems. Consequently, the demands on memory and storage are intensifying across every layer of the compute stack and memory hierarchy.
“AI context lengths are increasing by 30 times per year, while memory content per server has doubled in the past three years,” said Sumit Sadana, Micron executive vice president and chief business officer, at the show. “System performance is now driven by memory bandwidth and memory capacity, more than ever before. This structural shift in the semiconductor ecosystem makes memory and storage indispensable strategic assets — and Micron is leading with a range of industry-first and industry’s best products, from HBM to DRAM and NAND solutions designed for the AI era.”
The company should also benefit from the breakthrough in U.S.-Iran talks announced on June 15. Lower oil and gas prices should lead to lower inflation, which should stabilize interest rates and help support semiconductor stocks like Micron, which tend to outperform when investors grow confident and rotate more heavily into riskier market assets. That’s exactly what happened on June 15, when MU stock rose 10% on news that the Iran saga was entering a better phase and on new reports of chip demand from major AI developers.
Analysts are supporting the stock over the long haul, with 27 of 30 professional market trackers in “buy” mode, but, like KLAC, they expect MU’s skyrocketing share price to abate in the next few weeks, before new buyers jolt the stock upward in the second half of the year. Both UBS and Cantor Fitzgerald have MU shares rising significantly, up 49.3% and 37.4%, respectively, over the next year.
Nvidia Corp. (NVDA)
Nvidia has bounced back after a slow first quarter of 2026, with the stock up 14.1% year to date. That’s a relief to NVDA shareholders, who saw the stock slide by 6.5% from January through March, representing NVDA’s longest period of sustained negative returns since 2022.
The semiconductor giant is in funding mode right now, launching a $20 billion debt deal via a multi-tranche bond sale, largely to fund its own AI buildout and pay down some corporate debt. It’s not like Nvidia hasn’t been here before with big corporate bond deals. In 2021, Nvidia sold $5 billion in bond notes, though a smaller amount than the $20 billion that company leaders are now chasing. Nvidia likely felt that a large corporate bond sale is the most effective way to fund rising capital expenditures, which are expected to reach $7.9 billion in 2026, well ahead of the $6 billion and $3.2 billion in capex the company reported in 2025 and 2024.
Market analysts are well aware of Nvidia’s increasingly precarious climb as a massive chip provider and shareholder favorite, and the notion that business only gets tougher from here.
“At $212 per share and a $5.1 trillion market cap, it’s still the dominant chip company and probably will be for years,” says Alex Debelov, founder and creator of AI Money Map. Debelov, who’s owned Nvidia from its low-triple-digit share price days, said the math gets harder from here. “A doubling from $5 trillion means becoming a $10 trillion company, which is mathematically possible but requires near-perfect execution and continued ramping AI capex from hyperscalers.”
Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD)
Santa Clara, California-based Advanced Micro Devices’ share price is in major turnaround mode so far in 2026, returning 156% year to date and up 178% over the past three months.
At the start of the second quarter, Wall Street market trackers expected the stock to rise as demand for AI data center chips grows in the run-up to agentic AI, which will require stronger, more efficient central processing units. That’s right in AMD’s technology wheelhouse. AMD has also addressed its memory bottleneck issues with its recent purchase of MEXT, a memory optimization solutions provider. The deal should give AMD a cleaner path to more efficient AI chip development.
The share price rose 7% within 24 hours of the purchase announcement in mid-June. Couple that move with progress toward a U.S.-Iran peace deal, which should help stabilize the semiconductor supply chain, and analysts like AMD right now, as the company inches closer to a $900 billion market cap.
Of 35 industry analysts on TipRanks covering Advanced Micro Devices, 28 are buyers and seven are holding the stock.
Broadcom Inc. (AVGO)
Broadcom shares are up 14.1% year to date, and its long-term financial prospects look rock-solid. The company inked a $35 billion deal with Blackstone Inc. (BX) and Apollo Global Management Inc. (APO) to build an AI infrastructure platform. Dubbed AI XPV, the platform will provide about 20 gigawatts of computing capacity over the next two years, deploying Broadcom’s semiconductor chips and network services for high-growth AI players like Anthropic and OpenAI.
“We are at a historic inflection point, where the demand for AI compute is fundamentally reshaping the global economic landscape,” said Hock Tan, president and CEO of Broadcom, in a June 9 press release. “This strategic platform with Apollo and Blackstone synchronizes the world’s most sophisticated capital with Broadcom’s advanced technological roadmap to meet this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, by enabling our rapidly scaling customers, starting with Anthropic, to realize their most ambitious AI visions with speed and certainty.”
AVGO already has a significant alliance with Anthropic that could generate additional revenues from two recent chip orders, one for $10 billion and a later order for $11 billion. In late 2025, Broadcom also announced a strategic collaboration to deploy 10 gigawatts worth of OpenAI-designed AI accelerators. In tandem, Broadcom’s custom end-user chips are also used by Magnificent Seven members Alphabet Inc. (GOOG, GOOGL) and Meta Platforms Inc. (META), which is one big reason Wall Street estimates Broadcom’s revenues should rise by 66% in 2026, and likely much more in 2027, as AI data center chip demand shifts into even higher gear.
“Broadcom is the mega-cap I’d actually still buy here,” Debelov says. “Custom ASIC business for hyperscalers is a structural growth engine that’s somewhat decoupled from the Nvidia narrative. At $394 it’s not cheap, but the AI ASIC opportunity is genuinely large.” (ASIC stands for application-specific integrated circuit, a microchip designed to do one specific job well, rather than serving as a general-purpose chip.)
[Read: 8 Best Quantum Computing Stocks to Buy in 2026]
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSM)
Taiwan Semiconductor shares are up a robust 46% so far in 2026, primarily driven by the chipmaker’s strong alliances with tech sector elites such as Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices, Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Broadcom and strong 2026 sales (TSM’s revenues were up 30% in May alone).
The Taiwan-based chip provider has a unique problem that most CEOs would love to have — it can’t keep up with the demand for its products. In a recent shareholder meeting in early June, TSMC CEO C.C. Wei addressed the issue. “We are working very hard to build production lines in the U.S., but it is still not enough, far from enough,” Wei said, adding that the chipmaker is also planning new production sites in Japan and Germany.
Taiwan Semiconductor said the demand for AI chips, in particular, is growing significantly. “Our customers and their customers continue to give us a very positive outlook on AI,” Wei says. “We remain confident in the long-term AI megatrend and continue to see semiconductors as a fundamental necessity.”
In a sign of support from the company’s C-suite, senior executives are boosting their TSM stakes in 2026, with Senior Vice President Choh Fei Yeap buying 1,000 shares of TSM for $55,780 and Vice President Shyue-Shyh Lin purchasing 3,000 shares for about $164,160. Traditionally, senior executive insider buys are a sign of support for a company’s stock, so investors may breathe easier knowing that.
Credo Technology Group Holding Ltd. (CRDO)
This 17-year-old Cayman Islands-based data infrastructure company saw its stock price soar in 2025, and after a lackluster start to 2026, it’s seeing major share-price growth again. CRDO shares are up 80% year to date and up a whopping 149% over the past three months. That’s a big change from April, when Credo shares were down by 35% year to date.
This momentum play is operating on all cylinders right now, and the smart money is taking notice. Over the past two months, half a dozen Wall Street earnings estimates for CRDO rose, and none fell. As of June 16, CRDO’s consensus EPS estimate has risen from $4.60 to $5.94 over the past two months. The same goes for 2027, for which three analyst earnings estimates rose while zero moved in a negative direction.
Top-rated industry analysts support the stock, with Mizuho Securities analyst Vijay Rakesh holding his “buy” call on the stock with a $290 target price. The stock is currently trading around $246 per share.
A Trader’s Outlook on Semiconductor Stocks
Debelov, who’s grown his semiconductor portfolio position from 5% in 2020 to 55% in 2026, said he started investing in the industry by leaning into a simple premise. “I started building a semi-cap basket back in 2020 when the sector got hammered in the COVID shock,” he says. “My thesis was to focus on three companies (ASML, Applied Materials and Lam Research) that basically control the equipment that makes advanced chips, and KLA is the only one doing process control and metrology at advanced nodes at scale. It’s a quiet duopoly with AMAT in inspection, and a near monopoly in some of the deeper sub-segments.”
Six years later, Debelov said he’s turning constructive but selective on industry stocks. “I’m taking a six-month view, as while semiconductors keep working, the dispersion inside the sector widens a lot.”
Here’s why: Debelov says hyperscaler capex is running well above $400 billion annualized between Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon and Oracle. “That money flows through a very specific bottleneck,” he says.
“TSMC fabs at the advanced node, which means it flows through ASML, AMAT, LRCX, KLA and a handful of materials and substrate suppliers. These are the picks-and-shovels names, and they have visibility into 2027 order books right now. The market is finally catching up to what the order books have been saying for two quarters.”
Debelov’s concerns for the next six months center on concentration risk and rate sensitivity. “The semiconductor sector trades like a duration asset now because so much of the cash flow is back-loaded into the AI capex cycle,” he says. “If we get a real hawkish surprise from the Federal Reserve or a credit event in private AI infrastructure financing, the sector gets re-rated fast. That’s not because the demand is wrong, but because the multiple is sensitive.”
For investors, Debelov advises some caution. “Don’t just follow smart people, build your own thesis,” he says. “The 13F (regulatory filing) copy trade doesn’t work anymore because by the time the filing hits, the smart money has already moved. What does work is having a framework you actually believe in, and then using the smart money data to pressure-test it.”
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7 Best Semiconductor Stocks for 2026 originally appeared on usnews.com
Update 06/16/26: This story was previously published at an earlier date and has been updated with new information.
