Vanguard Asset Management 13F Portfolio

The biggest dollar adds are almost a caricature of the market narrative — Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet — but the sizing says this is not just benchmark hugging. Apple alone saw about $908.5M of incremental capital, with Nvidia close behind at roughly $904.3M, a clear statement that Vanguard believes these franchises can still earn their premium multiples.

More telling is how they are building out the ecosystem bet beneath the headlines. Broadcom, Micron, AMD, Intel, Texas Instruments, Applied Materials, Lam Research, KLA and even legacy names like IBM and Cisco were all increased in tandem. This is a coherent view that AI is as much a bandwidth, memory, tools and equipment story as it is about GPUs.

On the software and data side, Alphabet (both share classes), Meta, Amazon and Palo Alto Networks all saw double‑digit percentage share increases. That pattern suggests Vanguard is underwriting not just chip demand but the monetization layer — cloud, advertising, enterprise security — that will harvest AI’s economic surplus over time.

Outside pure tech, the new $526.5M position in RTX and the boost to GE Aerospace and Caterpillar extend the “infrastructure and hard power” theme into the physical world. These moves look like a hedge that defense and industrial capex will stay structurally high alongside digital capex, not a rotation away from AI.

For all the aggression on the AI complex, selling was almost surgically restrained. The only meaningful trims in this top-50 set are JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, both reduced by a little over 2% of shares with the positions still nicely in the green versus cost.

That pattern looks less like a negative view on financials and more like a pragmatic funding decision. Vanguard is taking profits in liquid, well‑owned money-center and investment banks to feed much larger adds in tech and aerospace, while leaving the rest of the financial sleeve — Bank of America, Wells Fargo, UBS, Royal Bank of Canada and Morgan Stanley — intact or growing.

Notably, they did not harvest gains where the run-up has been most extreme, such as Micron, AMD, or Intel, all sitting on very large percentage gains versus average buy. Choosing to trim modestly in banks instead of high‑beta semis is an explicit signal: they see more upside asymmetry in the AI supply chain than in traditional financial cyclicals at this point in the cycle.

At the sector level, the striking thing is how little they flinched. Technology stayed essentially flat as a share of the disclosed book, hovering just above 57%, despite strong price performance — meaning net new money largely went back into the same trade rather than being recycled elsewhere.

The most noticeable move on the margins is in industrials, where exposure stepped up from about 3.9% to 4.6%. New capital into RTX, plus added Caterpillar and GE Aerospace, turns industrials into a more deliberate sleeve, linking defense, aerospace and heavy equipment to the same thesis of rising global capex and geopolitical tension.

Health care ticked down modestly despite fresh buying in Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, AbbVie, Merck and UnitedHealth, suggesting relative underperformance rather than a real withdrawal. Finance similarly slipped from 6.8% to 6.5% as small trims in JPMorgan and Goldman offset adds in Bank of America, Wells Fargo, UBS, Royal Bank of Canada and Morgan Stanley.

Energy, consumer discretionary, staples and the payments duopoly (Visa and Mastercard, mis‑tagged as real estate here but functionally financial infrastructure) were all gently topped up without changing their overall footprint. The result is a barbell: AI‑centric tech on one side, and a diversified basket of cash‑generating defensives and real‑economy plays on the other.

Taken together, these moves sketch an investor positioning for an AI super‑cycle that bleeds into every layer of the economy. Keeping Nvidia at 6.13% of the book and ramping Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet at this scale is not risk‑averse behavior; it’s a statement that current earnings revisions and capex plans still understate the duration of this boom.

At the same time, the build‑out in semis equipment, analog and memory — Applied Materials, Lam Research, KLA, Texas Instruments, Micron, AMD, Intel and even SanDisk — shows a bias toward the picks-and-shovels of compute. If AI demand proves more volatile than hoped, these upstream suppliers and toolmakers may have more diversified revenue streams than a single product hero.

The mild shaves in JPMorgan and Goldman, combined with steady or rising stakes in energy, health care, consumer staples and big-box retail, are the stabilizers. They imply Vanguard wants the portfolio to survive higher-for-longer rates, sticky inflation or geopolitical flare‑ups without sacrificing upside to AI and cloud.

Going forward, unless tech dramatically underperforms, expect more of the same: incremental re‑ups into the AI stack funded at the edges from financials and other liquid winners, and selective reinforcement of defense and industrials as insurance against a world where both digital and physical infrastructure remain underbuilt.