Wall Street’s AI chip love goes from Nvidia to Intel to AMD to Micron

Since ChatGPT was announced in late 2022 and the generative AI boom began, one name has dominated the infrastructure boom. Nvidia.

While the chipmaker, and the world’s most valuable company, continues to thrive, with revenue expected to grow 70% this year, Wall Street has moved elsewhere, tapping into a business that was largely invisible in the early days of building artificial intelligence.

This week provided the clearest example yet of what Mizuho analyst Jordan Klein said could be a “changing of the guard in AI.” chip manufacturer advanced micro device and intel Memory manufacturers recorded a significant increase of approximately 25%. micron Soaring more than 37%, fiber optic cable manufacturers also corning It rose by about 18%.

These four companies have more than doubled in value this year, led by Intel, which has increased well over 200%. Nvidia, on the other hand, is up 15% for the year, helped by this week’s 8% gain, and will only slightly outperform the Nasdaq in 2026.

In distributing wealth across a broader range of hardware companies, investors clearly expect the bull market in AI to be long-lasting and that data centers will require a broader range of advanced components for years to come. Memory has been the biggest theme of late, as a global shortage has driven up prices and turned Micron, a 47-year-old company from a sleepy corner of the semiconductor market, into one of the hottest deals of the past 12 months.

Micron surpassed the $800 billion market cap for the first time this week, and its stock has risen more than 750% over the past year. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra told CNBC in March that major customers were only getting “50% to two-thirds of what they requested” due to supply issues.

The memory market is primarily dominated by Micron, along with South Korea-based Micron. samsung and SK Hynixboth in the midst of historic rallies.

“This is what happens when a market rapidly experiences material shortages, prices skyrocket, and expenses rise only modestly,” Mizuho’s Klein wrote in a note to clients earlier this week. “If you can’t add new capacity fast enough, you can make a lot of money by leveraging historical memory overweighting. It’s a no-brainer.”

Beyond memory, the central processing units (CPUs) that power everyday computers and smartphones are in constant demand. As model developers and cloud giants like OpenAI and Anthropic, they were largely an afterthought. google, microsoft and Amazon It was eating up Nvidia’s GPU.

Now, as momentum shifts from chatbots to AI agents, CPUs are once again in the spotlight. Bank of America predicts that the data center CPU market could more than double from $27 billion in 2025 to $60 billion in 2030.

AMD’s quarterly results this week highlighted new trends as earnings, revenue and guidance beat expectations for strong data center growth. The company has long led the CPU market, and CEO Lisa Su said on an earnings call that AMD expects the server CPU market to grow 35% over the next three to five years, exceeding the 18% growth forecast the company gave in November.

“Agents are really driving huge demand across the AI ​​adoption cycle, and we’re very excited to be in the middle of that,” Su said on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” after the company’s earnings report Wednesday.

Analysts at Goldman Sachs and Bernstein upgraded the stock to a buy rating, citing the CPU tailwind. JPMorgan Chase analysts also said the report “embodies the ongoing structural inflection in both server CPU and (data center) accelerator growth trajectories.”

Intel, which has long towered over AMD in the CPU market but has missed out on a number of big changes, most notably AI, is in the midst of a resurgence following a major investment from the U.S. government last year.

Intel’s stock price more than doubled to a record high in April, and has continued to rise significantly since then, rising 33% in early May. Shares rose 13% on Tuesday after a Bloomberg report said Apple was in talks with Intel and Samsung to produce main processors for devices destined for the United States. It rose another 14% on Friday after the Wall Street Journal reported that Intel and Apple had reached an agreement for the chipmaker to make some processors for Apple devices.

Representatives for Intel and Apple declined to comment.

Elsewhere in the new AI stack, some companies are directly benefiting from the partnership with Nvidia.

Glass maker Corning, which celebrated its 175th anniversary this week, signed a major deal with Nvidia on Wednesday. This includes the development of three U.S. factories dedicated to the chip giant’s optical technology.

The deal gives Nvidia the right to invest up to $3.2 billion in Corning and could be a major step in Nvidia’s transition from copper to fiber optic cables when building rack-scale systems. Earlier this year, Corning signed a $6 billion contract with Meta through 2030 to provide fiber optic cables to the social media company’s AI data centers.

“We’re going to scale our optical offerings at a scale that, frankly, no optical company has ever enjoyed,” NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Thursday. He said the economy was experiencing “the largest infrastructure overhaul in human history.”

Corning’s recent boom on Wall Street has seen its stock hit an all-time high in February, finally surpassing its highest since the dot-com era in 2000. Since then, the stock price has continued to rise.

Analysts see a number of other comparisons to the Internet boom of the late 1990s, which preceded a prolonged market collapse.

BTIG analyst Jonathan Klinksey said in a recent note that the size of the semiconductor industry’s price increase is similar to 1999. The sector’s key benchmark, the PHLX semiconductor index, is up 66% so far this year and warned of a 25% to 30% correction.

“We’ve written ad nauseum about how extreme the semifinal moves are, in many cases not seen since the dot-com bubble,” he said. “But in some ways this move is actually more extreme.”

—CNBC’s Katie Tarasov and Kristina Partinevelos contributed to this report.

Attention: Rising chip prices raise concerns about bubbles