Harford County's Jeff Judge in Investopedia: What AI is changing inside a Nasdaq 100 fund

ByJeff Judge, CFP®, AEP®, ChFC®, CLU®, Managing Partner, Chesapeake Financial Planners, Forest Hill, MD.

If you own a Nasdaq 100 fund, you own a lot of AI. But AI does not show up inside the fund as one thing, and that matters for how you read your own portfolio. Investopedia's Nathan Reiff recently looked at how AI is reshaping the index and reported that eight of the 20 biggest companies in it are now chipmakers.

Here is how I think about it. A Nasdaq 100 fund owns builders, spenders, and beneficiaries at the same time. The builders sell the chips and the data centers. The spenders pay for them, and the hardware inside those data centers wears out on an accounting schedule. If it wears out faster than planned, the math behind the spending changes. Capital intensity is also rising across the index, which changes how much a company has left after it pays for its own growth. The beneficiaries use AI to improve products they already sell, through better ad conversion, lower cloud costs, and faster fraud detection. That AI revenue is largely indirect, not a standalone product line.

For families in Fallston, investors across Baltimore County, and professionals commuting into Towson, the point is not to avoid the index. It is to know which of the three roles your fund leans on, because they carry different risks on different timelines.

The takeaway: look at your fund's top holdings and sort them into builder, spender, or beneficiary. If one group dominates, that is worth knowing. This is general education, not individualized advice.

This piece builds on "How Artificial Intelligence Is Reshaping the Nasdaq 100," in Investopedia (September 2026).

Jeff Judge, CFP®, AEP®, ChFC®, CLU®, is Managing Partner at Chesapeake Financial Planners in Forest Hill, MD. Book an intro call.