U.S. Semiconductors and Semiconductor Capital Equipment: Bernstein Semi Cycle Tearsheet: The only game in town?

Research evidence excerpt

U.S. Semiconductors and Semiconductor Capital Equipment: Bernstein Semi Cycle Tearsheet: The only game in town?

23 June 2026

U.S. Semiconductors and Semiconductor Capital Equipment

Bernstein Semi Cycle Tearsheet: The only game in town?

The only game in town? The AI theme has grown so large that it is now dragging Stacy A. Rasgon, Ph.D.

+1 213 559 5917 everything in the space along with it (except, perversely, the AI compute names themselves).

stacy.rasgon@bernsteinsg.com But the appetite to play the constraint/bottlenecks has continued as attention rolls from

one to the other (hitting memory, semicap, optical/networking, analog/power, and, most

Alrick Shaw recently, CPUs), and even intensified as investors pursue what, for many of them, remains

+1 917 344 8454

alrick.shaw@bernsteinsg.com the only game in town.

Arpad von Nemes Step right up? But if you’ve been there, you’ve been rewarded with the SOX now returning

+1 917 344 8461 107% YTD, dwarfing the S&P (+9%). And while expectations and valuations have spiked

arpad.vonnemes@bernsteinsg.com over the last three months we continue to gain some solace in the fact that the performance

so far this year has largely been driven by earnings growth, with forward EPS for the SOX up

75% since the beginning of the year.

(Almost) everyone’s a winner? So far AI demand continues to show no signs of slowing

with all signs right now pointing to continued multi-year visibility and tight supply/capacity

in virtually all needed components, and even many non-AI names have broadly been able

to construct AI narratives. Overall we remain bullish on AI demand, and our AI compute

names (perversely the only “losers” so far as “bottlenecks” have attracted more attention)