Is an AI-Focused ETF the Right Move for a 2026 Portfolio?

• If caller past repeats, artificial quality (AI)-focused ETFs volition beryllium must-haves for investors successful 2026.

• Data corroborate marketplace participants are upbeat connected AI investments entering the caller year.

• Before diving in, investors should perpetrate to a fewer minutes to AI ETF “homework.”

• 10 stocks we similar amended than S&P 500 Index ›

With connection services and exertion ranking arsenic the 2 best-performing sectors successful the S&P 500 (SNPINDEX: ^GSPC) successful 2025, it's not astonishing that marketplace participants are enthusiastic astir the 2026 outlook for artificial quality (AI) assets.

Data corroborate that ebullience. Nearly two-thirds of investors surveyed by the Motley Fool judge AI-related companies volition supply semipermanent ballast to their portfolios. Notably, much than 90% of existent owners of AI equities and related exchange-traded funds (ETFs) program to support oregon summation their holdings.  

There are immoderate absorbing demographic tidbits regarding millennials and Gen Z, arsenic good arsenic affluent investors, who awesome the astir assurance astir AI's semipermanent trajectory. That's pertinent arsenic it relates to AI ETFs due to the fact that newer and younger marketplace participants are much apt to usage ETFs oregon adjacent physique full portfolios with conscionable ETFs than their older counterparts.

To beryllium sure, each of those are absorbing facts, but there's much to the AI ETF story.

Home to $7.41 cardinal successful assets nether absorption (AUM), the Global X Artificial Intelligence & Technology ETF (NASDAQ: AIQ) is the largest dedicated AI ETF. Several others person northbound of $1 cardinal successful AUM, and a mates much are adjacent to reaching that lofty status.

Underscoring the relevance of AI ETFs successful 2026 are expectations of ongoing monolithic spending by hyperscalers. Citing statement forecasts, Goldman Sachs estimates that AI infrastructure spending successful 2026 volition scope $527 billion, surpassing the $465 cardinal projected astatine the extremity of the 3rd quarter.

Perhaps highlighting the benefits of the handbasket attack offered by AI ETFs, Goldman notes that since June 2025, the banal terms correlations of hyperscalers to spending-driven headlines person materially declined. The slope notes that this is simply a motion investors are scouring the marketplace for the adjacent radical of AI winners extracurricular the "Magnificent Seven." With AI ETFs, investors don't request to prime idiosyncratic winners due to the fact that the funds execute that dense lifting.

It's a bully thing, too, due to the fact that an array of catalysts volition enactment the AI concern thesis successful 2026, but those sparks won't use to each AI stock. Those factors see summation AI/human partnerships successful the workplace, strides successful healthcare, broader probe capabilities, and different leap guardant by large connection models (LLMs), among others.