Investors are on the hunt for new AI companies outside the U.S. Here are their bets

Artificial intelligence-related U.S. stocks have risen strongly in recent years. And investors are now on the hunt for AI companies in other regions, driving up the price of their securities.

The largest company in terms of capitalization on the European stock market is the Dutch manufacturer of equipment for the production of advanced chips ASML. Also on everyone's lips is Nebius Group, a provider of cloud computing services, which includes the assets that Arkady Volozh withdrew from Yandex. Nebius shares are traded on Nasdaq, but the company itself is Dutch. Since the beginning of this year, its shares have grown in value 2.6 times, and its capitalization has exceeded $55 billion.

But investors are also "scouring" the market for other AI-related players, causing their stocks to rise many times over in a short period of time.

"Anyone investing in Europe is desperate to get into the AI sector" and there is a real gold rush in this market, Emmanuel Ko, Barclays' director of European equity strategy, told the Financial Times. That said, it is relatively small and there are "no million AI winners", Coe added: "So everything that is relevant to it is performing well."

The Stoxx Europe Total Market Semiconductors industry index of semiconductor manufacturers is up about 86% this year, while the Stoxx Europe 600 broad market index is up just 2.4%.

The top four stocks in the Stoxx Europe 600 were chip, chip equipment and data center makers STMicroelectronics, Aixtron, BE Semiconductor and Nokia: they were up about 100-170%.

The first phase of AI stock trading was exclusively in US tech giants, says Kasper Elmgreen, chief investment officer at Nordea Asset Management: 'It seems natural to me that as this rally strengthened, investors started to look at companies outside the US.'

An additional factor, he said, is that Europe is trying to build strategic autonomy and reduce its dependence on technologies from the United States. Therefore, new companies are emerging and developing there, including those whose products are necessary for the AI boom. This is what investors are after.

Investors see an additional opportunity to make money in stocks that are expected to provide data centers and cloud services. Among them are electric power companies, including "green" ones, such as Siemens Energy, as well as Prysmian, which produces fiber optics and electric cables. This year, their shares have risen by more than 40% and 75%, respectively.

The rapid rise of AI-related securities has caused some market participants to become cautious. The sector has become "quite expensive," says Roland Caloian, director of European equity market strategy at Societe Generale.

Ko from Barclays believes that too many investors are chasing the shares of some companies. As a result, the capitalization to projected earnings (P/E) ratio of companies in the sector became very high: STMicroelectronics - 53.19, Aixtron - 49.75.

"Obviously you have to be a lot more careful about picking stocks now than you were six months ago," Elmgreen said. - But I think the really good opportunities are still out there."

Having made good money on AI companies in the US, investors are looking for similar opportunities in other technologically developed countries( Donald Trump's policies are anadditional incentive ). These include countries in Asia.

Japan's Nikkei 225 index has soared more than 60% over the past year and more than 20% since the start of 2026, significantly outperforming the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite, which have added 8.2% and 12.8% this year, respectively.

The market is led upward by SoftBank, a large investor in technology companies, and technology, export-oriented leaders - Tokyo Electron, Advantest, TDK and others.

Analysts say a strong driver for the rally has been an influx of funds from foreign investors who see the large and liquid Japanese market as an attractive opportunity to diversify outside the US. In doing so, they are looking to invest in the same AI-related sectors in which they previously made money in the U.S., Kirk said.

The Nikkei crossed 60,000 points in April, now up to 60,815 points. Tomochika Kitaoka, chief equity strategist at Nomura, raised his year-end forecast to 63,000 points, given the influx of foreign investment and "interest in investing in anything AI-related."

However, the real arrival of U.S. investors in the Japanese market has not even really begun, says Neil Newman, Japan market strategist at Astris Advisory, based on conversations with them. He says foreigners are still playing the AI field in a big way, which is easiest to do with large companies in the Nikkei index.

South Korea and Taiwan have been among the best markets in the world this year, notes Jeff Sommer, author of the Strategies column on markets and finance in The New York Times. All thanks to chip makers - led by Korea's Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, as well as Taiwan's TSMC.

Over the past year, their shares have risen 4.8 times, 8.8 times and 2.3 times, respectively.

Because index provider MSCI still classifies South Korea and Taiwan as emerging markets, they make up 43.7% of the weighting in the MSCI Emerging Markets index. This has also made the index a kind of "AI play," Sommer notes: it is up 19.6% YTD.

Investors have been concerned for some time about whether the explosive growth of the AI sector represents a bubble.

The Philadelphia Semiconductor Chipmaker Index (comprising 30 U.S.-listed companies, including AMSL and TSMC) has soared more than 63% since the start of this year. The last time it overtook the S&P 500 as significantly was in 2000, at the peak of the Internet bubble, which then deflated until 2022, Sommer points out, citing a report by Bespoke Investment Group.

Prominent investor Michael Burry warned that AI has dumbed down the entire stock market, where a tech bubble has once again inflated and is bound to burst.

Companies are acting like they are willing to pay any price to ensure their dominance in the AI market, writes Jon Treacy, publisher of investment newsletter Fuller Treacy Money, "But the worry is not when companies increase their spending, but when they start cutting back without getting a commensurate increase in profits."

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor