Viewed as a whole, the U.S. stock market has experienced a rolling A.I. rally, shifting focus on different groups of stocks but retaining its power. First to ascend in the market were big tech stocks in the so-called Magnificent Seven, comprising Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla. As the rally spread, traders bid up stocks that designed, produced or were in other ways connected to semiconductors — the silicon chips needed to run A.I. In addition, a variety of other shares gained, too, including equipment and generator companies like Caterpillar, utility companies and even fossil fuel companies like Exxon Mobil, which help to sate the voracious appetite of A.I. data centers for electric power.
In fact, practically wherever you look, A.I. is a factor — though not always a favorable one. Software stocks, like Oracle, Salesforce and even Microsoft (also a major developer of A.I. data centers), were pummeled on fears that A.I. agents may make many of their profit centers irrelevant. That interpretation of the implications of A.I. is open to question. The point is that for better and for worse, you can’t easily avoid A.I. in the stock market.
A Global View
Take international stock funds. They returned 12.8 percent in the three months through June, according to Morningstar. Over 12 months, international stock funds did even better, with a 26.8 percent return — 3.6 percentage points ahead of domestic stock funds.
You might think that this is the result of diversification away from A.I., but you would be wrong. Instead, it reflects the global strength of the A.I. trade. For example, if you hold an index fund, like the Vanguard Total International Stock Fund (as I do, in a workplace retirement account), you will find that its top five holdings are all A.I.-adjacent. These include Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, ASML and Tencent.
Emerging market funds, driven by some of the same stocks, have risen smartly, too, with a quarterly return of 22.4 percent and a 12-month gain of 45.9 percent.
