Wall Street AI chip love has moved from Nvidia to Intel, AMD and Micron

Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 and the beginning of the generative AI craze, one name has dominated the infrastructure boom: NVIDIA.

While the chip maker – and the world’s most valuable company – continues to prosper and is expected to show revenue growth of 70% this fiscal year, Wall Street has gone elsewhere, piling into businesses that were barely visible in the early years of artificial intelligence creation.

This week offered the clearest example yet of what Mizuho analyst Jordan Klein said could be a “changing of the guard in AI.” chip manufacturer advanced precision instruments And intel Profit of about 25% during Memory Maker micron jumped more than 35% and fiber-optic cable makers Corning Soared nearly 20%.

All four of those companies have more than doubled in value this year, with Intel leading the way, up more than 200%. Meanwhile, Nvidia is just ahead of the Nasdaq in 2026, with a 16% gain this year, helped by a 9% gain this week.

In spreading the money across a broad group of hardware companies, investors are clearly betting that the bullish market in AI has long legs and that data centers will need a wide range of advanced components in the years to come. Memory has been the hottest topic for some time now due to global shortages, which have sent prices soaring and Micron, a 47-year-old company based in a dormant corner of the semiconductor market, has become one of the hottest trades of the last 12 months.

Micron surpassed $800 billion market capitalization for the first time this week, and the stock is now up more than 750% in the past year. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra told CNBC in March that major customers were only getting “50% to two-thirds of their requirements” due to supply issues.

The memory market is largely dominated by Korea-based Micron as well as Micron SAMSUNG And SK HynixBoth of which are also in the midst of historic rallies.

“This occurs when a market rapidly enters a material shortage situation and pricing becomes higher” while spending “increases only modestly,” Mizuho’s Klein wrote in a note to clients earlier in the week. “You make a lot of money being overweight, when new capacity can’t be added fast enough that historical memory deteriorates. It’s that simple.”

Beyond memory, there is insatiable demand for the central processing units (CPUs) that power everyday computers and smartphones. They became popular mostly as model developers like OpenAI and Anthropic and cloud giants Google, Microsoft And Amazon Were gobbling up Nvidia’s GPUs.

Intel had in stock the best month The stock more than doubled, hitting a record in April, and has continued to post massive gains with a 33% surge in early May. Shares rose 13% on Tuesday Bloomberg report Apple is in talks with Intel and Samsung to produce core processors for its US devices. After this, on Friday they climbed another 14% wall street journal Intel and Apple were reported to have reached an agreement for the chip maker to produce 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 that includes the development of three new US factories dedicated solely to optical technologies for the chip giant.

The deal gives Nvidia the right to invest up to $3.2 billion in Corning, and is potentially a major step away from Nvidia’s copper cables toward fiber-optic cables as it builds its rack-scale systems. Earlier this year, Corning signed a $6 billion deal with Meta through 2030 to provide fiber-optic cable to the social media company’s AI data centers.

“We’re going to scale optical at a scale that, frankly, no optical company has ever scaled up,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Thursday. He said the economy was undergoing “the largest infrastructure build-out in human history.”

Corning’s recent rally on Wall Street sent its stock to record highs in February, when it finally surpassed its previous high of the dot-com era in 2000. It continued to increase in the months that followed.

Analysts are seeing many other comparisons to the Internet boom of the late 1990s, which was preceded by a prolonged market decline.

Jonathan Krinksi, an analyst at BTIG, said in a recent note that the magnitude of the markup in the semiconductor sector looks like 1999. He warned of a 25% to 30% correction for the PHLX semiconductor index, a key benchmark for the sector, which is up 66% so far this year.

“We’ve written about how extreme the moves have been in the semi-finals — in many cases not seen since the dot-com bubble,” he said. “However, in some ways, this step is actually more extreme.”

—CNBC’s Katie Tarasov and Christina Partsinevelos contributed to this report.

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