Under the Spotlight AUS: Global X FANG+ ETF (FANG)

U.S. tech stocks powered to fresh highs this week after Nvidia ($NVDA) said it would soon resume selling AI chips to China.  

Nvidia’s record breaking run to a US$4t market cap is great news for the Global X FANG+ ETF ($FANG). The chip giant is among a ten stock portfolio of the most traded U.S. tech names. 

$FANG - which is up 34% from its April low - tracks the NYSE FANG+ Index. Permanent fixtures on the index include Meta Platforms ($META), Apple ($AAPL), Amazon.com ($AMZN), Netflix ($NFLX), Microsoft ($MSFT) and Alphabet Class A ($GOOGL), so it’s little surprise that many Stake customers have the ETF on their watchlists. 

Rounding out the ten are chipmaker Broadcom ($AVGO), workflow software platform ServiceNow ($NOW) and cybersecurity play CrowdStrike ($CRWD). 

FANG charges a 0.35% management fee and pays out twice a year. 

Ni hao Nvidia

Nvidia’s green light to resume selling its H20 AI chip in China reflects the lobbying efforts of CEO Jensen Huang, who met with President Trump earlier this month to discuss AI and chip exports.

Huang spent months convincing the U.S. government that April’s export controls were hurting U.S. leadership in the AI race. Nvidia claimed the restrictions had halved its market share in China. 

Nvidia announced a US$5.5b charge in April after limits were placed on sales of its H20, the most advanced AI chip it sells to China. 

Not only will Nvidia start selling H20 chips to China, it also announced a new graphics processing unit (GPU) which was ‘fully compliant’ for use in smart factories and logistics. 

Speaking in Beijing this week, Huang said it was ‘really important’ for U.S. companies to have a Chinese presence as half the world’s AI researchers are based there. Baidu’s Ernie AI model has joined DeepSeek in challenging the likes of ChatGPT. 

Demand for Nvidia’s AI chips remains red-hot as tech giants invest billions into large language models and the data centres that support them. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing ($TSM), which produces chips for Nvidia, reported a 38% year-on-year increase in Q2 revenue due to booming AI demand. 

Nvidia shares are up 83% from their April lows. Eyes now turn to its Q2 earnings on August 27. 

AIl about AI

FANG offers plenty of exposure to the AI revolution. 

Broadcom hit a record high this week, underpinned by demand for its XPUs – chips that handle specific AI tasks more efficiently than Nvidia’s GPUs. 

Broadcom upped its rivalry with Nvidia this week after revealing a new networking processor called Tomahawk Ultra, designed to handle data flows of AI and high performance computing. Its shares are up 95% since April. 

FANG is also a way to access the wave of mergers and acquisitions, as tech giants race to grow AI capabilities and snap up top AI talent in the process. 

Meta Platforms bought PlayAI earlier this month, adding its technology which uses AI to produce human sounding voices. That followed a US$14.3b buy-in for 49% of Scale AI, alongside hiring its CEO. Meta is up 45% since April.

Then there’s Alphabet’s Google, who just paid US$2.4b to recruit the CEO, co-founder and top research staff from AI coding startup Windsurf. They’ll join the company’s DeepMind AI business and develop tools for Google’s AI assistant Gemini. 

Earlier this year, Alphabet also paid US$32b to acquire Wiz to bolster its cloud security offering.    

Amazon is considering increasing its investment in Athropic, the developer of Claude. Bezos’ behemoth has already invested US$8b in Anthropic, plus another US$100m in its generative AI innovation centre. 

Amazon shares have rallied 34% since April on the back of its recent Prime Day sales event. 

Take two

CrowdStrike is a name known globally - just not for the right reason. But that hasn’t deterred investors.

One year on from the cybersecurity provider’s faulty update that sparked a global technology outage, CrowdStrike’s stock has rallied 32%. 

CrowdStrike’s Falcon system uses AI to help clients rapidly detect threats and deal with them more quickly. It also monitors AI models to protect against ‘shadow AI’, or malicious models.

ServiceNow may not have the same brand cache as some of the big U.S. tech stocks, but that isn’t stopping its AI ambitions. 

Best known for workflow automation, it’s now rolling out agentic AI to perform specific tasks across an organisation by combining data and workflow automation. 

Big byte

FANG offers access to leading U.S. tech stocks that have generated strong returns over recent years. 

Its small portfolio of 10 highly traded stocks provides concentrated exposure to companies at the edge of innovation and the forefront of the AI revolution. 

This is not financial advice nor a recommendation to invest in the securities listed. The information presented is intended to be of a factual nature only. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance. As always, do your own research and consider seeking financial, legal and taxation advice before investing.