New Delhi, Aug. 9 -- When Donald Trump announced last weekend that he had canceled a planned strike on Iran and opened new diplomatic talks, the clearest financial beneficiaries were not American defense contractors or oil traders. They were a cluster of European semiconductor companies that almost no one outside specialized fund management had tracked closely before January.

five of the benchmark's best-performing stocks this year are semiconductor manufacturers supplying the AI infrastructure buildout.

The rally's scale is visible across every major European bourse. Germany's DAX crossed 26,000 for the first time on August 3 and closed near 26,300 by Friday. France's CAC 40 reached 8,700. Italy's FTSE MIB hit 53,540. The five top perf...