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Binance Research tracks a group it calls "Next Gen Users": young customers of Binance Direct Stocks, based in emerging markets, with small balances. Among them, NVIDIA is the most common first trade at 20%, followed by Micron at 8%. Apple shows up further down, in the long tail, alongside Tesla and the Nasdaq-100 ETF.
The first US stock this cohort buys is a chipmaker. For a generation of American retail investors, it was more likely a consumer brand.
The Old Default Holding
A core holding is the stock a new investor buys first and then keeps. In the US, that slot was often filled by a household name, the company whose products sat in people's pockets.
Even at home, the default is moving. JPMorgan's data on top single-stock retail buys in early 2026 had Tesla, Nvidia, Amazon, Palantir, AMD and Micron at the top. In one week of July, VandaTrack data showed Apple among the names leading retail outflows. US retail is rotating too, just from a different starting point.
"If we're talking about traditional, like, US stock users, in the US, the most famous stock and the largest one that people are buying and holding are likely Apple," Binance's Interim Chief Marketing Officer, Eowyn Chen, said in an interview with The Rollup. "We see a lot more of those silicon AI infrastructures, databases, no matter that's the ETFs or its related stocks, are holding and trading a lot more actively with our platform. So it just shows that, hey, this is a different user base than traditional U.S. markets are serving and accessing."
Her point is less about Apple than about which part of the economy feels like the safe middle of a portfolio. Anyone who started buying in 2025 or 2026 grew up, as an investor, on the hardware and software behind AI. So it's no surprise where the money goes. Binance Research found Direct Stocks users keep roughly 60% of their equity holdings in information technology and communication services, and about 26% in semiconductors alone.
Which US Stocks Are Popular With Emerging-Market Investors?
The short answer is chips. Follow the buy orders and they land on chipmakers and AI infrastructure first, then on index ETFs and a few headline listings. On bStocks, Binance's tokenized stocks, Gen Z puts 26% of its buy value into SpaceX, against 16% for Millennials, and 8% into index ETFs such as QQQ and SPY, against 3%. Crypto-linked stocks such as Strategy and Circle remain the largest category for both groups, at 40% for Gen Z and 50% for Millennials, and pure tech and AI names are actually a smaller slice of Gen Z's bStocks buying (6% against 14%).
So the chip tilt is clearest in first trades and in direct stock holdings, less so in the tokenized product. Binance says bStocks now cover AI infrastructure, semiconductors and sector ETFs.
The tilt isn't confined to one platform. In India, Nvidia accounted for roughly one-fifth of buy orders among the 10 most-ordered US stocks on the Appreciate app this year, and five of those 10 were semiconductor or memory companies. On Vested Finance, the 10 most-traded names over six months didn't include Apple at all.
South Korea shows a similar pattern with more risk attached. Individual investors there bought a net $7.04 billion of US stocks between July 1 and August 27, and the top pick, at $3 billion, was a 3x leveraged semiconductor ETF.
Different apps, different countries, different regulators and, in Korea's case, a very different appetite for leverage. What these investors share is youth, a home outside the US, and a habit of reaching for the AI supply chain first.
Signal or Cycle
There's a fair objection to all this. Lean a portfolio on one theme and it lives or dies with that theme, and the mood around AI stocks is already cooling. In eToro's Q3 2026 Retail Investor Beat (a survey mostly of developed markets), 47% of retail investors said they expect AI-related stocks to rise, down from 57% a year before. Gen Z's number slipped too, to 41% from 47%.
What a cohort treats as core reflects when and where it started. These investors arrived in markets led by AI infrastructure, and they arrived from places without American households' long attachment to consumer brands. Should the semiconductor tilt survive a real downturn in chip stocks, it will say something lasting about how a new generation defines a core holding. If it fades, it was a cycle trade, and plenty of investors of every age have ridden one of those before.
A New Definition of Core
A new investor class's first holdings tend to shape its habits for years, and this one is starting with the AI supply chain. A full market cycle will show whether those positions become permanent.
For now, the starter portfolio of a young investor in an emerging market looks less like one whole Apple share and more like a few dollars of NVIDIA.
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