The chip trade, 24 ways: storage up 358% this year, chip-design software down 8% in a week

Everyone says chips as if it were one trade. It is not. Our Rubin Build-Out 100 splits the chip world into 24 sector sub-indices, from the software that designs a chip to the concrete of the data center that runs it, and on Friday's close those 24 lines ranged from +358% for the year (storage) to −1% (photomasks), from +17% for the month (storage again) to −20% (wafer processing). The whole index is up 89% this year and down 2.4% over the past month. That is not a chip sell-off. It is a rotation inside the chip trade, and the 24 lines show exactly where the money went.

All numbers are equal-weight sub-indices through Friday's US close, September 4. Asia's Monday session, the Kospi up 4% on OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, lands in the index with tonight's recompute; where it matters we quote this morning's moves separately.

1. The chips themselves: memory is the trade of the year

Two of the four product sectors are the whole story of 2026. Storage (SanDisk, Kioxia, Western Digital) is up 358% this year, 17% over the past month and 11% last week alone, with SanDisk up 12% on Friday. HBM memory (SK hynix, Samsung, Micron) is up 173% for the year and 16% for the month. This morning Kioxia added 9.3%, SK hynix 7.4% and Samsung 5.0% in Seoul and Tokyo, so both lines print higher again tonight. The other two product sectors tell the opposite story: power semiconductors (Infineon, STMicro, Texas Instruments, ON) are up 52% this year but down 7% over the month, and machine vision and sensing (Keyence, Cognex, ams-OSRAM) is up 70% for the year but down 5% for the month. The chips the AI build-out cannot get enough of are being bought; the chips that go into cars and factories are being sold.