SMH vs SOXX: The Two Big Semiconductor ETFs Are Really a Bet on Nvidia

Holdings data as of August 6, 2026, straight from each fund's reported book. Weights are what the ETFs actually hold, not estimates.

If you want semiconductor exposure in one ticker, two names dominate: SMH, the VanEck Semiconductor ETF, and SOXX, the iShares Semiconductor ETF. They track the same corner of the market and, once you get past the top few holdings, own most of the same companies. But the top few holdings are the whole story, and they make these two funds behave very differently.

Here's the one number that matters. SMH puts 18.54% of the fund in Nvidia. SOXX puts 7.20%. That's not a rounding difference. Buy SMH and roughly one in every five dollars rides on a single stock. Buy SOXX and Nvidia isn't even the top holding, it sits third behind Micron and AMD. Same sector, and yet your single biggest bet is completely different.

SMH is concentrated. SOXX is spread out.

SMH stacks the money at the top. After Nvidia comes Taiwan Semiconductor at 8.97%, then Broadcom at 5.61%, Micron at 5.46%, and AMD at 5.32%. The top five is 43.9% of the fund. Put another way, Nvidia and TSMC alone are more than a quarter of SMH. It's a bet that the two biggest winners of the AI buildout, the designer and the manufacturer, keep leading.

SOXX spreads the same money wider. Its top five is Micron at 8.25%, AMD at 7.69%, Nvidia at 7.20%, Broadcom at 6.53%, and Intel at 6.34%, which comes to 36.0% of the fund. Nothing towers over the rest. And notice what's at the top: Micron and AMD. SOXX leans harder into the memory cycle and into AMD's challenge to Nvidia, rather than betting the fund on Nvidia itself.

The Taiwan difference is worth its own line. SMH holds 8.97% in TSMC, its second-largest position. SOXX holds 4.18%, buried down the list. If you think the whole AI trade ultimately runs through one foundry in Taiwan, SMH gives you far more of that exposure, along with far more of the geopolitical risk that comes attached to it.

Now the part that surprises people: underneath the top holdings, these funds are nearly twins. Both own the same equipment makers at almost identical weights, the picks-and-shovels names that sell gear to every chipmaker regardless of who wins the design war: Applied Materials, Lam Research, KLA, and ASML. If you already hold those individually, both ETFs pile more on top.

Where they drift apart is at the edges. SOXX reaches a little further into names SMH underweights or skips, like Astera Labs and ON Semiconductor. SMH leans into the chip-design software side, with Cadence and Synopsys sitting higher in its book. Small differences, but they tell you what each issuer is emphasizing.

So which one? It depends entirely on your view of one company. If you're bullish on Nvidia specifically and want a fund that moves with it, SMH is the cleaner expression, and its TSMC weighting doubles down on the manufacturing side of the same bet. If you'd rather own the semiconductor sector without hanging almost 20% of your money on one stock, SOXX gives you the group with far less single-name risk. One is a concentrated bet on the leaders. The other is a bet on the industry.

One last thing. Chips are only half the AI-infrastructure story. The other half is the power to run them and the buildings to house them, which is a very different set of companies. If you want that side, here's the teardown of the nuclear, uranium, and data-center ETFs. And the full ETF library if you want to line SMH and SOXX up against the rest.