Direxion’s 3X semiconductor ETF surged Monday as Alphabet-Intel TPU report fanned chip-demand optimism

The Direxion Daily Semiconductor Bull 3X ETF surged in Monday trading, with the move tied to fresh momentum in semiconductor stocks and a specific narrative gain for Intel: a reported Google order for millions of AI accelerator chips. In a write-up published at midday, The Motley Fool said the ETF was up roughly in the high-teens to near 21% around noon as buyers returned to a sector that had sold off earlier. That amplified move matters because SOXL is designed to magnify daily swings in the semiconductor benchmark.

SOXL is a 3 times leveraged ETF. It targets daily performance of 300% (three times) of the NYSE Semiconductor Index’s daily return, before fees and expenses, and it is not meant to track three times the index performance over longer stretches because of daily compounding effects.

What drove the catalyst, according to the same report, was news that Alphabet’s Google placed an order for more than three million tensor processing units, or TPUs, to be manufactured at Intel’s foundry in 2028. TPUs are Google’s custom AI chips optimized for the matrix-heavy workloads that power training and inference. The potential significance for chip buyers is straightforward: a large prospective foundry workload can shift expectations about which suppliers can meet hyperscaler demand for advanced AI compute.

The ETF’s rally also fit into a broader “AI spending is early innings” argument. The Motley Fool tied the sector bounce to the idea that AI-related semiconductor investment is still building over multiple years. It pointed to Nvidia’s role through GPUs, Intel’s emphasis on CPUs for orchestrating and enabling AI “agents,” and the direct connection of Google’s TPU strategy to the companies’ supply chain.

The report further suggested that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, another major semiconductor exposure in the ETF ecosystem, is struggling to keep pace with end-market demand, prompting Google to look for alternative or additional manufacturing capacity. While that framing was presented as part of the investment thesis, it also helps explain why a foundry-related headline can move multiple names at once, especially when the underlying index is volatile.

Alphabet has also been indicating that it expects to scale AI infrastructure aggressively. In a June 1, 2026 equity capital raise announcement, Alphabet described its plan to fund investments in AI compute infrastructure amid “unprecedented customer demand,” including proceeds intended for capital expenditures to scale AI infrastructure and global compute. In the same release, Alphabet said its 2026 capital expenditures are expected to be $180 billion to $190 billion.

Still, investors were not given a fully confirmed, company-issued order detail. The TPU order was reported by The Information and relayed through Reuters-style reporting, and at least one recap noted that Alphabet, Intel, or Nvidia had not verified the claims. A June 8 move like this can also reflect more than one factor, including the “bounce-back” element described by The Motley Fool after a prior selloff. What to watch next is whether Alphabet or Intel issues any confirmation, whether the reported quantities or timelines change, and whether the market continues to treat AI infrastructure supply constraints as a near-term theme for semiconductor stocks and leveraged products like SOXL.