The Globe and Mail reports in its Wednesday, June 3, edition that the current wave of artificial intelligence mania has primarily benefitted small-cap stocks rather than the major players like Microsoft, Amazon and Nvidia. A Reuters dispatch to The Globe reports that while these tech giants dominate the headlines and valuations soar, investors are also looking forward to potential trillion-dollar IPOs from Anthropic and OpenAI. But amid all this, companies with market caps below $2-billion have undergone a stealth rally (all figures U.S.). The small-cap benchmark Russell 2000 index is up 17 per cent this year, outstripping the S&P 500's 10-per-cent rise. The smaller players have led this year, driven by two sectors, tech and energy. The small-cap indices have outperformed their more heralded megacap peers by some distance. Many smaller companies are better set up to benefit from an energy price spike than their larger peers. That's because a higher proportion of their costs tends to be fixed, so a rise in oil prices will more readily lead to increased cash flow. Crude prices are still 30 to 35 per cent higher than where they were on Feb. 27. The small-cap outperformance has been even more pronounced in tech.