These 6 Stocks Make Up a Big Share of the S&P 500
Nvidia (NVDA -3.17%), Microsoft (MSFT +6.68%), Apple (AAPL +5.31%), Amazon (AMZN +6.12%), Alphabet (GOOG +3.25%) (GOOGL +3.18%), and Meta Platforms (META +1.44%) walk into an index fund. They take up about a third of the room.
As of Nov. 2, 2026, these six stocks make up 30.8% of the S&P 500 (^GSPC +1.58%). Line up the index’s 428 smallest companies, and their combined weight still looks small by comparison.
That share has held roughly steady in recent years. In October 2024, the same six stocks made up about 30.2% of the S&P 500. Most of the added concentration since then has come from further down the list, as Broadcom, Tesla, and Eli Lilly gained ground. The index’s 10 largest companies now account for 39% of its weight, up from about 36.4% two years ago.
The group of six mega-techs has still outperformed, though. The Roundhill Magnificent Seven ETF (MAGS +2.24%) owns these six plus Tesla in equal doses and rebalances every quarter. It gained 41.9% over the last two years. The Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (VOO +1.62%) managed a 31.7% increase. That’s a respectable result, just not a particularly magnificent one.
Here is a closer look at each tech titan at the top of the S&P 500 index.
NVDA – Nvidia
$200.13-$6.56 (-3.17%)
NASDAQ · As of 4:00 PM ET 11/04/26
Nvidia
Every gold rush needs someone selling shovels, and Nvidia makes the sharpest and shiniest ones. Its AI chips sit inside the data centers the other five companies keep building, and the stock rose 49.3% over two years. That’s good enough for a 7.1% slice of the S&P 500.
That position cuts both ways. Nvidia’s best customers are the four big spenders on this list, and several of them design their own chips. That’s a bit like each of your biggest clients opening a shovel factory in their backyards. Guidance points to roughly 89% year-over-year sales growth in the upcoming Q3 2027 report. That’s down from 106% in Q2 but still an impressive velocity. Nvidia is fine as long as the digging for AI gold continues.
Microsoft
Microsoft got to the AI party early, and now it’s stuck with the catering bill. The stock gained 23.6% in two years, trailing the index, and its weight slid from 6.4% to 5.5%.
Azure remains one of the largest cloud platforms, and the OpenAI partnership gave Microsoft an early lead in AI software. But investors have grown more cautious about the cost. Microsoft spent $39.4 billion on capital expenditures last quarter, largely on AI data centers and the computing hardware in them. On the upside, the company is financing it with incoming cash flows rather than new debt or stock sales. The open question is how quickly Copilot subscriptions and Azure AI revenue can justify that spending.
$349.51+$17.61 (+5.31%)
NASDAQ · As of 4:00 PM ET 11/04/26
Apple
Apple, meanwhile, essentially skipped the AI spending spree and still ended up as the biggest company in the S&P 500, at 7.2%. The stock rose 51.9% over two years. Believe it or not, that’s a slightly better showing than Nvidia’s over the same period.
This company’s capital spending is pocket change next to its peers’, at just $3.2 billion in Q4 2026. It has partnered with others for some AI features rather than building every artificial brain in-house. I admire the thrift. Still, if AI reshapes how people use their phones, Apple could end up renting key AI technologies from the same rivals it competes with.
Image source: Getty Images.
Amazon
Amazon’s 24.2% gain in two years is within shouting distance of the S&P 500’s increase. Its weight crept from 3.5% to 3.9%.
Amazon Web Services rents computing power to everybody else, which makes Amazon both a big AI spender and a landlord to other AI spenders. It even builds its own chips, called Trainium, so it doesn’t have to buy every shovel directly from Nvidia. Capital spending hit $77.3 billion last quarter. That’s a lot of shovels in three months, and Amazon is taking on costly debt to pay for them. AWS growth tells you whether the landlord is filling the units.
GOOGL – Alphabet
$288.93+$8.90 (+3.18%)
NASDAQ · As of 4:00 PM ET 11/04/26
Alphabet
Two years ago, many investors thought AI chatbots would eat Google Search for lunch. Alphabet apparently didn’t get the memo. In last week’s Q3 2026 report, Search posted 12% year-over-year revenue growth amid the highest query growth in five years. The stock has risen 63% since November 2024, the best on this list, and its S&P 500 weight climbed from about 3.6% to 4.9%.
Alphabet builds its own AI chips, runs a growing cloud business, and spends like the rest of them, with $51.4 billion in capital spending last quarter. But all that spending pushed free cash flow to negative $9 billion, and the stock fell about 10% after the Q3 report. Investors liked the receipts right up until they started showing more cash going out than coming in. Even so, Alphabet remains the clearest case on this list of AI spending that has paid off for shareholders.
Meta Platforms
Meta Platforms trails the group. The stock rose just 7% over two years, and its index weight fell from 2.5% to 2.3%. Tesla now ranks ahead of it in the S&P 500.
Meta is spending heavily on AI, at $34.9 billion last quarter, but it has no cloud business to rent that capacity to other companies. The returns have to come from Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, mainly through better ad targeting and new AI products. The ads are still working, judging by Meta’s double-digit growth in both ad impressions and average ad prices. Investors just aren’t sure the rest of the bill makes sense yet.
Source: www.fool.com — article syndicated from the publisher’s feed; all rights remain with the original publisher.