Wall Street’s AI chip passion ranges from Nvidia to Intel, AMD and Micron

Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 and the start of the AI ​​production craze, one word has dominated the infrastructure boom: Nvidia.

While the chip maker – and the world’s most valuable company – continues to thrive and is expected to show revenue growth of 70% this fiscal year, Wall Street has gone elsewhere, piling on businesses that didn’t look good in the early years of artificial intelligence.

This week provided a startling illustration of what MIzuho analyst Jordan Klein said could be a “changing of the guard in AI.” Chip makers Advanced Micro Devices again Intel achieved about 25%, while the memory maker Micron jumped more than 37% and fiber-optic cable maker Corning up about 18%.

All four of those companies have more than doubled in value this year, with Intel leading the way, up more than 200%. Nvidia, meanwhile, is slightly ahead of the Nasdaq in 2026, gaining 15% for the year, aided by an 8% rally this week.

In spreading wealth across a wide range of hardware companies, investors are clearly betting that the bull market in AI has long legs and that data centers will need a wide array of advanced components for years to come. Memory has been a big theme of late as a global shortage has pushed up prices and turned Micron, a 47-year-old company in a sleepy corner of the semiconductor market, into one of the hottest stocks of the past 12 months.

Micron hit the $800 billion market cap for the first time this week, and the stock is now up more than 750% over the past year. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra told CNBC in March that key customers are only getting “50% to two-thirds of their needs” because of supply issues.

The memory market is largely dominated by Micron, also Korea-based Samsung again SK Hynixthey are both in the middle of historic circles.

“That’s what happens when the market quickly enters a situation of supply shortages and prices rise” while costs “increase slowly,” Mizuho’s Klein wrote in a note to clients earlier in the week. “You make a lot of money by overweighting the historical memory increases when new capacity can’t be added fast enough. That’s easy.”

Beyond memory is the insatiable demand for central processing units (CPUs), which power everyday computers and smartphones. They have become an afterthought as model developers like OpenAI and Anthropic and cloud giants Google, Microsoft again Amazon they were upgrading Nvidia’s GPUs.

Now CPUs are back in the limelight as the momentum shifts from chatbots to AI agents. Bank of America estimates that the data center CPU market could more than double from $27 billion by 2025 to $60 billion by 2030.

AMD’s quarterly results this week underscored the emerging trend, as revenue, revenue and guidance beat previous estimates for strong data center growth. The company has long been a CPU leader, and CEO Lisa Su said on an earnings call that AMD now expects 35% growth over the next three to five years in the server CPU market, up from the 18% growth forecast the company provided in November.

“Agents are driving the biggest demand in the AI ​​adoption cycle, and we’re very excited to be at the center of it,” Su told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Wednesday, following the company’s earnings report.

Analysts at Goldman Sachs and Bernstein upgraded the stock to buy ratings, citing CPU tailwinds. And JPMorgan Chase analysts said the report “clarifies ongoing structural changes in both server CPU and [datacenter] accelerator growth methods.”

Intel, which for many years surpassed AMD in the CPU market before missing out on many big changes, especially AI, is in the middle of a revival caused by a huge investment from the US government last year.

Intel stock had its best month on record in April, more than doubling, and has continued to see big gains, rising 33% in the early days of May. Shares rose 13% on Tuesday following a Bloomberg report that Apple is negotiating with Intel and Samsung to produce the main processors for its US devices. They rose another 14% on Friday after the Wall Street Journal reported that Intel and Apple had reached an agreement for the chip maker 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 that includes the development of new US factories dedicated entirely to the chip giant’s optical technology.

The deal gives Nvidia the right to invest up to $3.2 billion in Corning, and is likely a big step in Nvidia’s move away from copper wires and toward fiber-optic cables as it builds its own scale systems. Earlier this year, Corning entered into a $6 billion deal with Meta until 2030 to provide fiber-optic cables to the AI ​​communications company’s data centers.

“We’re going to add optical to a degree that, frankly, no other optical company has ever enjoyed,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Thursday. He said the economy is going through “the single biggest building block in human history.”

Corning’s recent progress on Wall Street sent its stock to a record high in February, when it finally surpassed the dot-com era in 2000. It has continued to rise in the months since.

Analysts see many other parallels in the development of the Internet in the late 1990s, which preceded widespread market exchange.

Jonathan Krinksy, an analyst at BTIG, said in a recent letter that the size of the markup in the semiconductor space is similar to 1999. He warned of a 25% to 30% correction in the PHLX Semiconductor Index, a key benchmark for the sector, which is up 66% so far this year.

“We’ve written ad nauseam about how big the movement has been — often unseen since the dot-com bubble,” he said. “However, in some ways, this step has gone too far.”

-CNBC’s Katie Tarasov and Kristina Partsinevelos contributed to this report.

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