Wall Street AI chip love moves from Nvidia to Intel, AMD and Micron
AMD CEO Lisa Su speaks to CNBC on May 6, 2026.
CNBC
Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 and the start of the generative AI craze, the infrastructure boom has been dominated by one name: Nvidia.
As the chip maker and the world’s most valuable company continues to thrive and is expected to post 70% revenue growth this fiscal year, Wall Street has moved elsewhere, turning to businesses not often seen in the early years of AI development.
This week offered the starkest example yet of what MIzuho analyst Jordan Klein says could be a “changing of the guard in AI.” chip producers Advanced Micro Devices And Intel memory builder while delivering notched gains of around 25% Micron Jumped more than 35% and fiber optic cable manufacturer Corning increased by approximately 20%.
All four of these companies have more than doubled in value this year, with Intel leading the way with an increase of over 200%. Nvidia, meanwhile, is just slightly ahead of the Nasdaq in 2026, gaining 16% for the year, helped by a 9% rise this week.
Investors clearly believe that the bull market in AI will be long-term and that data centers will need a wider range of advanced components in the coming years as they spread the wealth across a broader segment of hardware companies. Memory has been a big theme of late as a global shortage drives up prices and turns Micron, a 47-year-old company in a quiet corner of the semiconductor market, into one of the hottest trades of the last 12 months.
Micron surpassed the $800 billion market cap for the first time this week, and the stock is up more than 750% in the past year. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra told CNBC in March that they were only able to meet “50% to two-thirds of the needs” of major customers due to supply issues.
The memory market is largely dominated by Micron and Korea-based SAMSUNG And SK HynixBoth are in the midst of historic rallies.
“This is what happens when the market quickly enters a state of material shortages and expenses rise only modestly while prices rise,” Mizuho’s Klein wrote in a note to clients earlier in the week. “When new capacity can’t be added fast enough, you make a lot of money by overweighting the revival of historical memory. It’s that simple.”
Agencies create ‘enormous demand’
Beyond memory, there is an insatiable demand for central processing units (CPUs), which form the basis of everyday computers and smartphones. They had mostly become an afterthought as model developers and cloud giants like OpenAI and Anthropic. Google, Microsoft And Amazon They were gobbling up Nvidia’s GPUs.
Now, as momentum shifts from chatbots to AI agents, CPUs have come back into the spotlight. Bank of America estimates 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 underlined the emerging trend; earnings, revenues and guidance exceeded estimates of strong data center growth. The company has long managed the CPU load, and CEO Lisa Su said in the earnings call that AMD expects 35% growth in the server CPU market over the next three to five years, above the 18% growth forecast the company provided in November.
“Agents are really creating tremendous demand in the overall AI adoption cycle, and we’re very excited to be in the middle of it,” Su told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Wednesday after the company’s earnings report.
Shares of Intel and AMD last year
Analysts at Goldman Sachs and Bernstein upgraded the stock to buy rating, citing CPU’s downside headwinds. And JPMorgan Chase analysts said the report “clarifies the ongoing structural shift in both the server CPU and server CPU.” [datacenter] accelerating growth trajectories.”
Intel, which has long outperformed AMD in the CPU market and missed several major transitions, particularly in artificial intelligence, is in the midst of a revival sparked by a major investment from the US government last year.
Intel’s shares best month It more than doubled to a record high in April and continued to make big gains, up 33% in the first days of May. Shares gained 13 percent on Tuesday. Bloomberg report It is stated that Apple is in talks with Intel and Samsung to produce main processors for its devices in the USA. They rose another 14% after Friday. Wall Street Magazine Intel and Apple have reportedly reached an agreement for the chipmaker to produce some processors for Apple devices.
Representatives from Intel and Apple declined to comment.
Elsewhere in the new AI stack, some companies are directly benefiting from partnerships with Nvidia.
Glass maker Corning, which celebrates its 175th anniversary this week, signed a major deal with Nvidia on Wednesday that includes the development of three new U.S. factories dedicated entirely to optical technologies for the chip giant.
The deal gives Nvidia the right to invest up to $3.2 billion in Corning and will likely be a key step in Nvidia’s transition from copper cables to fiber optic cables when building rack-scale systems. Earlier this year, Corning signed a $6 billion deal with Meta through 2030 to provide fiber optic cables to the social media company’s AI data centers.
“We’re going to grow the optical industry 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 undergoing “the largest infrastructure buildout in human history.”
Corning’s recent rally on Wall Street sent its shares to a record high in February, when it finally reached its highest level since the dot-com era in 2000. It has continued to rise in the months since then.
Analysts see many comparisons to the internet boom that preceded a prolonged market crash in the late 1990s.
The magnitude of the increase in the semiconductor space is similar to 1999, BTIG analyst Jonathan Krinksy said in a recent note. He warned of a 25% to 30% correction for the PHLX Semiconductor Index, a key benchmark for the industry that is up 66% so far this year.
“We have written ad nauseam about how extreme the half-term action is – in many cases not seen since the dot-com bubble,” he said. “But in some ways this movement is actually more extreme.”
—CNBC’s Katie Tarasov and Kristina Partsinevelos contributed to this report.
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