Catenaa, Saturday, May 09, 2026- Wall Street has seen the changing of the guard in AI, as investors choose stocks like Intel and AMD, while market leader Nvidia lags.
While Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company, continues to prosper and is expected to show revenue growth of 70% this fiscal year, Wall Street has moved elsewhere, piling into businesses that were hardly visible in the initial years of the artificial intelligence buildout.
This week offered the starkest illustration yet of what MIzuho analyst Jordan Klein told CNBC could be a “changing of the guard in AI.” Chipmakers Advanced Micro Devices and Intel notched gains of about 25%, while memory maker Micron jumped more than 37% and fiber-optic cable maker Corning climbed about 18%.
All four of those companies have more than doubled in value this year, with Intel leading the way, up well over 200%. Nvidia, meanwhile, is only slightly ahead of the Nasdaq in 2026, gaining 15% for the year, aided by an 8% rally this week.
In spreading the wealth to a wider swath of hardware companies, investors are clearly betting that the bull market in AI has long legs and that data centers are going to need a wider array of advanced components for years to come.
Memory has been the biggest theme of late due to a global shortage that’s driven up prices and turned Micron, a 47-year-old company tucked in a sleepy corner of the semiconductor market, into one of the hottest trades over the past 12 months.
Micron blew past an $800 billion market capitalization for the first time this week, and the stock is now up over 750% in the past year. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra told CNBC in March that key customers are only getting “50% to two-thirds of their requirements” because of supply issues.
The memory market is largely dominated by Micron, along with Korea-based Samsung and SK Hynix, both of which are in the midst of historic rallies.
“That is what happens when a market quickly enters a material shortage condition, and pricing surges higher,” while expenses “rise only modestly,” Mizuho’s Klein wrote in a note to clients early in the week. “You make a lot of money being overweight. Historic memory turns when new capacity cannot be added fast enough. That’s simple.”
Beyond memory is an insatiable demand for central processing units (CPUs), which underpin everyday computers and smartphones. They had mostly become an afterthought as model developers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and cloud giants Google, Microsoft and Amazon were gobbling up Nvidia’s GPUs.
Now CPUs are back in the spotlight as momentum shifts from chatbots to AI agents. Bank of America estimates the data center CPU market could more than double from $27 billion in 2025 to $60 billion in 2030.
