Some of the biggest winners in the stock market over the last three years have been companies riding the rising wave of generative artificial intelligence.

Palantir (PLTR -5.39%), with its artificial intelligence platform, has seen its stock rise by over 2,000% in three years. Nvidia (NVDA -4.84%), the poster child for AI chipmakers, is up by more than 1,300% in the same period. And neo-cloud providers like Nebius Group (NBIS -2.37%) and CoreWeave (CRWV -3.32%) have soared by triple-digit percentages since their IPOs.

If you had invested $10,000 in any one of these big winners ahead of their surges, you’d be well on the way to having a million-dollar holding in the long term, even if they produce merely average returns from here on out. But identifying which companies will be a new technology’s big winners ahead of time is difficult. If it were easy, everyone would be rich.

If you’d like to profit from the ongoing growth of AI, you could put a little bit of money into a lot of different AI stocks, or you could buy an ETF that specializes in finding generative AI opportunities. That’s what the Roundhill Generative AI & Technology ETF (CHAT -5.03%) does. Investors who are still trying to strike it rich with generative AI stocks may find it a compelling alternative to attempting to pick individual AI stocks themselves.

Image source: Getty Images.

Looking under the hood

The Roundhill team is focused on building a portfolio of companies that are actively involved in the advancement of generative AI. Its holdings include companies developing their own large language models and generative AI tools, companies providing key infrastructure for training and inference, and software companies commercializing generative AI applications.

Since it’s an ETF, investors can see exactly what the fund holds. Here are the largest holdings in the portfolio as of this writing.

• Nvidia
• Alphabet
• Oracle
• Microsoft
• Meta Platforms
• Broadcom
• Tencent Holdings
• Alibaba Group Holdings
• ARM Holdings
• Amazon

There aren’t a lot of surprises in the list. Perhaps the biggest standout is Arm, which is relatively small compared to the other tech giants with large weightings in the portfolio. Still, its market cap comes in at a healthy $165 billion.

In total, the ETF holds 40 stocks and several currency hedges for foreign-issued shares as of this writing. That diversification gives it a good chance of holding a few companies that will be big winners from here, which may be all it takes to produce market-beating returns. Indeed, the portfolio includes some of the best-performing stocks of 2025, including Palantir.

Since its inception in 2023, the Roundhill Generative AI & Technology ETF has returned an impressive 148% compared to a 66% total return from the S&P 500. And that’s factoring in the drag of the ETF’s 0.75% expense ratio.

Could $10,000 invested make you a millionaire?

In order to turn $10,000 into $1 million, the ETF would have to increase in value 100-fold. That may be difficult, considering the current sizes of its top holdings.

Nearly one-third of the portfolio is invested in companies with market caps exceeding $1 trillion, and the larger a company becomes, the more raw growth it takes to move the needle on its size on a percentage basis. For Nvidia to grow by even 25% now would be the equivalent of creating a whole new trillion-dollar business. And while such growth is certainly possible for some of those megacap companies, there’s still a finite amount of money in the global economy.

Meanwhile, there are only a handful of relatively small businesses in the ETF’s portfolio that could reasonably be expected to multiply in size significantly.

Additionally, many stocks in the portfolio have high valuations. Palantir shares trade for a forward P/E ratio of 280. Nebius trades for 54 times expected sales. Even CoreWeave’s sales multiple of 12.5 looks expensive, given its reliance on debt to continue growing. That said, some of the best performers of the last few years also looked expensive a few years ago (including Palantir and Nvidia). Still, the expected return of stocks with such high valuations isn’t going to be as high as those offering more compelling values.

As such, it seems unlikely the Roundhill Generative AI & Technology ETF will produce returns strong enough to turn $10,000 into $1 million over a reasonable time frame. That doesn’t mean that it’s not worth owning. For investors looking to gain exposure to the generative AI trend without going all in on one or two stocks, buying the Roundhill Generative AI & Technology ETF is a simple way to do that.