Wall Street’s AI Chip Rotation Lifts Intel, AMD and Micron
CNBC reported Friday that Wall Street’s AI chip rotation is accelerating, lifting Intel, AMD and Micron to eye-catching gains while Nvidia trails behind the broader move.
A Broadening AI Chip Rotation Takes Hold
Investors piled into hardware names this week that barely registered during AI’s early infrastructure boom. AMD and Intel each climbed roughly 25% over five sessions. Memory maker Micron surged more than 35%. Fiber-optic cable manufacturer Corning added about 20%. All four have more than doubled in 2026, with Intel leading at gains exceeding 200% year-to-date. Mizuho analyst Jordan Klein described the shift as a “changing of the guard in AI.”
Nvidia, by contrast, gained around 16% for the year. That is only marginally ahead of the Nasdaq. The chipmaker still commands the world’s largest market capitalization and is forecast to post 70% revenue growth this fiscal year. But the marginal dollar on Wall Street is clearly moving elsewhere.
Memory Shortage Fuels Historic Micron Rally
The memory segment has been the loudest story in semiconductors. A global supply crunch has driven prices sharply higher while production costs have moved only modestly. Micron crossed an $800 billion market capitalization for the first time this week. Its stock has gained more than 750% over the past year. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra told CNBC in March that major customers are receiving only half to two-thirds of what they need because supply simply cannot keep pace. Korean rivals Samsung and SK Hynix are staging similarly historic rallies.
CPU Demand Surges as AI Agents Replace Chatbots
Beyond memory, central processing units are staging a remarkable comeback. CPUs had faded into the background as cloud giants and model developers raced to acquire Nvidia GPUs for training large language models. That calculus is changing. The shift from chatbots to autonomous AI agents requires far more general-purpose compute. Bank of America estimates the data center CPU market could grow from $27 billion in 2025 to $60 billion by 2030, a figure that would represent more than a doubling of the segment.
AMD CEO Lisa Su said on the company’s earnings call this week that she now expects server CPU market growth of 35% over the next three to five years. That compares to an 18% forecast issued just last November. Analysts at Goldman Sachs and Bernstein each upgraded AMD to buy. JPMorgan said the results confirm a structural shift across both server CPU and data-center accelerator markets.
How the AI Hardware Landscape Has Shifted
For the first several years following ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022, Nvidia’s GPUs were the indispensable ingredient in every AI buildout. The company still benefits enormously from that position. But investors are now pricing in a world where data centers require a far wider array of components. CPUs, high-bandwidth memory and fiber-optic networking infrastructure are all seeing demand that suppliers are struggling to meet. The rotation does not mean Nvidia loses. It means the market has grown large enough to mint new winners alongside it.
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