How the character of the AI trade has changed — for the worse — in 2026

Something has shifted around the AI trade. Can you feel it?

All the bullish oxygen is being sucked out of the room and squarely into the memory chip shortage, which is offering bumper profits for a handful of firms. On a related note, semicap equipment stocks have been an upstream beneficiary of this dynamic. The underlying message is that near-term scarcity is being rewarded by the market.

That the big capex spenders will generate a high return on investment from their outlays is not something traders are willing to take for granted. Big budgets are not necessarily getting applauded.

The big “consumers” of memory chips are getting squeezed. This includes the hyperscalers, obviously, but even more so the likes of Qualcomm, which has to wait behind these giants in line for supplies.

For public markets, the theme is more of a net negative than a positive. Firms seen as the most likely to be disrupted by AI (basically, the entire software industry) are getting indiscriminately clobbered, regardless of how good their quarterly results and guidance are.

And this isn’t really a 2026 dynamic, strictly speaking, but the two biggest chip companies have been dead money for months. Since the end of Q3, Nvidia and Broadcom are both negative, with the S&P 500 up about 2% over this span.

The Takeaway

Perhaps the biggest driver of these trends is that in some of these zero-sum shifts in value, the companies that are benefiting? They ain’t public. SpaceX/xAI, OpenAI, and Anthropic? The facilitators of disruption, in many cases, have not yet arrived on public markets but plan to do so this year.

So if the AI theme has seemed a little “negative sum” in this year, that might be about the room that investment firms know they’re going to need in their portfolios to add these stocks once they’re able to (or, in some cases, ahead of time).