T. Rowe Price fund increases investments in Greater China AI supply chain

While most investors chasing the AI boom have been piling into the usual suspects, one T. Rowe Price fund is taking a different approach: going smaller and deeper into the supply chain that actually builds the stuff.

The T. Rowe Price Funds SICAV China Evolution Equity Fund is ramping up its exposure to lower-tier companies in Greater China’s AI supply chain. These aren’t the headline-grabbing chipmakers or cloud giants. They’re the firms manufacturing printed circuit boards, chip production equipment, and power components, the industrial plumbing that AI infrastructure literally cannot function without.

The picks behind the pivot

As of June 30, 2026, the fund’s allocations reveal a clear thesis. Kingboard Laminates, a PCB materials manufacturer, sits at 6.3% of the portfolio. Unimicron Technology, which produces electronic components, takes up 3.7%. WUS Printed Circuit Kunshan rounds out the top picks at 2.8%.

Portfolio specialist Agnes Ng has noted that while the broader Chinese equity market remains subdued, these specific holdings are positioned to benefit from supply bottlenecks as AI capital expenditures ramp up across the region.

The fund, managed by Wenli Zheng, deliberately looks past the largest publicly listed firms in Greater China. Instead, it hunts for companies that fall outside conventional benchmark indexes but stand to gain disproportionately from structural spending trends. Zheng has identified AI investment beneficiaries as one of the fund’s core opportunity areas.

Performance that backs the thesis

As of July 31, 2026, the China Evolution Equity Fund posted a year-to-date return of 19.66%. Its one-year return hit 41.74%. Over three years, it has delivered an annualized return of 14.81%.

All of those figures significantly outperformed the MSCI China All Shares Index over the same periods.

Expanding the distribution footprint

T. Rowe Price appears to be capitalizing on the fund’s momentum. On September 8-9, 2026, the firm announced a distribution partnership with Bank of East Asia to broaden its reach into retail and private banking channels in Hong Kong.

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