The Nasdaq 100 is up roughly 6% year-to-date. The SMH, the cleanest semiconductor benchmark, prints around 27.5%. The Closelook Rubin Build-Out 100 — our own index of the AI hardware supply chain — is up 65% equal-weight and just under 90% on the momentum variant.
That spread is the story. Not that semis are running. Semis always run in AI cycles. The story is that the specific supply-chain layers we mapped in the Rubin index are running harder than any broad ETF captures. The Nasdaq dilutes the signal with software, consumer, and services exposure. The SMH averages across the entire chip complex. Rubin isolates the AI infrastructure supply chain and nothing else.
The sector breakdown YTD shows why
The top five Rubin sectors year-to-date: High-Speed Interconnects +124%, Memory (HBM & NAND) +107%, Advanced Materials +99%, Substrates & Interposers +94%, Testing & Metrology +78%. Those are the Early Ramp layers of the Rubin GPU cycle — the layers our Generation Rotation Framework predicted would lead first. They led.
The bottom three: Wafer Processing +3%, EDA & Chip IP +16%, Architects (Chip Design) +16%. That is the Sunset of the prior cycle — Hopper-era leaders absorbing capital rotation away from them. Also predicted by the framework.
This week the ranking reordered
Power Semiconductors +13.53% is the new #1 — up from rank #7 on the year-to-date view. EDA & Chip IP +10.71% is second, recovering sharply from its Sunset trough. Foundry & Integration +10.18% and Testing & Metrology +8.40% complete the top four. Gases, Chemicals & Consumables at −0.56% is the only negative sector on the week.
The Mid-Ramp layer is joining. Power delivery for GB200 and Rubin rack architectures is the structural catalyst: ON +44% on the month, STM +37%, MPWR +36%. The old leaders did not hand over — High-Speed Interconnects is still positive at +7.95% on the week, still up 124% YTD. Nothing rotated out. One more layer rotated in.
Constituent zoom — High-Speed Interconnects, 10 names:
Three-month prints inside this sector alone: Applied Optoelectronics +341%, Lumentum +176%, Marvell +84%, Coherent +82%, Credo +63%. That is the dispersion behind a single sector number of +124% YTD. Every Rubin sector hides a similar distribution.
Constituent zoom — Memory, 5 names
Memory at +107% YTD also hides a split: SK hynix +56% on three months leads HBM, SanDisk +121% leads NAND for AI inference storage, Micron +24% lags on both. The sector index averages three different theses into one number.
Closing thought. When a custom index runs thirteen times the benchmark, the question is not whether it is right. The question is what it measures that the benchmark does not. Rubin measures the AI supply chain layer by layer. The Nasdaq measures averages. The spread is the framework working.
Full sector map and constituents: closelook.net/indices/rubin