REX Shares Launches CHIP ETF to Capture Global AI Chipmaking Equipment Growth

REX Shares (“REX”), a leading innovator in alternative ETFs, announced the launch of the REX AI Chipmaking ETF (Ticker: CHIP), a thematic ETF built to own the equipment layer of the Artificial Intelligence buildout. CHIP holds the companies that make the tools each AI chip has to pass through: wafer fabrication equipment, advanced packaging, and metrology, rather than the chip designers and foundries that buy from them.

Most portfolios already hold the AI mega-caps. CHIP owns what those companies can’t build without, and it doesn’t need to pick the winning chip. Whether CUDA, a rival GPU, or hyperscaler custom silicon prevails, every one of those chips is fabricated on the same front-end tools, and TSMC, Samsung, SK Hynix, Intel, and Micron are all customers. Next-generation nodes and memory generation add process steps rather than removing them, so equipment content per chip rises structurally. And these incumbents are hard to dislodge. Each process step has its own specialist; only a handful can compete for it. Once a tool is qualified into a production line, it stays. For some steps, such as EUV lithography, no second source exists.

The launch comes as the AI capital expenditure (capex) wave is now reaching the equipment layer. Capex flows to toolmakers on a natural 12- to 18-month delay (announce, plan capacity, order tools, then install), so while chip designers and foundries led the first wave, equipment makers are only now entering their acceleration phase. Equipment billings grew 15% in 2025², and SEMI forecasts a record $165.9 billion for 2026¹. Creative Strategies named the pattern the “Gigacycle” in December 2025³. Hyperscalers have guided to $720 billion to $745 billion of 2026 capex, and three separate drivers are running at once: AI infrastructure demand, government-funded fab construction, and rising process complexity per chip.

“Investors have spent two years buying the chip designers. The equipment makers those designers all depend on are now seeing the capex arrive,” said Greg King, CEO and Founder of REX Shares. “Whichever architecture wins, it gets built on the same tools. CHIP is designed to give investors that layer in a single, globally diversified ticker.”

The ETF is based on the VettaFi AI Chipmaking Index, which tracks global companies essential to the chip manufacturing process behind the AI buildout. The index allocates 50% to wafer fabrication equipment, 25% to advanced packaging, and 25% to metrology across 55 constituents as of August 31, 2026⁵, capped at 5% each quarterly rebalancing. Only about a third of the index carries a primary U.S. listing; Tokyo Electron, Advantest, and DISCO are Japanese, and ASML and Besi are Dutch. Assembling this exposure from U.S.-listed shares alone would leave roughly two-thirds of it out.

The fund will be listed on Nasdaq under ticker symbol CHIP with an expense ratio of 0.65%.