AMD on Thursday said it will invest more than $10 billion across Taiwan’s semiconductor and AI ecosystem to advance chip production and performance.

Taiwan is at the center of the semiconductor industry because of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world’s largest chip manufacturer, which makes products for the most valuable companies in the world from Nvidia to Apple.

AMD has been a beneficiary of the continued heavy spending on AI infrastructure with its shares doubling so far this year as it looks to step up competition to rival Nvidia, which itself reported blowout earnings on Wednesday.

“Working with strategic partners in Taiwan and globally, AMD is advancing leading-edge silicon, packaging and manufacturing technologies that enable higher performance, greater efficiency and faster deployment of AI systems,” the company said in a press release.

The investments will focus on partnerships with companies to “advance” chip packaging and manufacturing required for next-generation AI infrastructure.

AMD said it is collaborating with Taiwan-based ASE and SPIL on areas such as the technology that links chips together, which can improve their performance efficiency.

The innovations are designed to support the deployment of Helios, its AI server system in the second half of 2026, the company said.

Sanmina, Wiwynn, Wistron and Inventec are among the partners that AMD named as helping to build Helios.

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

While the chipmaker — 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 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 said 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, which are also both 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 upturns when new capacity cannot be added fast enough. That simple.”

Intel’s stock had its best month on record in April, more than doubling, and has continued notching massive gains, rising 33% in the early days of May. The shares surged 13% on Tuesday following a Bloomberg report that Apple is in talks with Intel and Samsung to produce the main processors for its U.S. devices. They climbed another 14% on Friday after the Wall Street Journal reported that Intel and Apple have come to an agreement for the chipmaker to manufacture 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 celebrated its 175th anniversary this week, signed a massive deal with Nvidia on Wednesday that involves 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 is likely a major step in Nvidia’s move away from copper cables and towards fiber-optic cables as it builds out its rack-scale systems. Earlier this year, Corning inked a $6 billion deal with Meta through 2030 to provide fiber-optic cables in the social media company’s AI data centers.

“We’re going to scale up optical at a scale that, quite frankly, no optical companies have ever enjoyed,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Thursday. He said the economy is going through the “single largest infrastructure buildout in human history.” 

Corning’s recent boom on Wall Street pushed its stock to a record in February, when it finally passed its prior high from the dot-com era in 2000. It’s continued to soar in the months since.

Analysts are seeing plenty of other comparisons to the internet boom of the late 1990s, which preceded an extended market bust.

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

“We have written ad nauseam about how extreme the move in semis has been — in many cases not seen since the dot-com bubble,” he said. “In some ways, however, this move is actually more extreme.”

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

WATCH: Rally in chips raises bubble concerns

Big Tech stocks were on track to wrap a massive week on Friday, with shares of Oracle, Advanced Micro Devices and Microsoft set to post historic gains and benchmarks.

Oracle, up 32% week-to-date, is on track for its best week since October 1999. The company expanded an artificial intelligence data center power deal with Bloom Energy on Monday, contracting 1.2 gigawatts of capacity from Bloom. Oracle was issued a warrant to purchase $400 million of Bloom shares last week.

AMD is up 13% this week and hit an all-time high on Thursday, climbing over 40% during a run of 12-consecutive days of gains, its longest streak in over 20 years.

Microsoft is up more than 14% this week, pacing for its best week since April 2015. Microsoft’s rebound comes after the software giant wrapped its worst quarter since 2008 in March, where it lost almost a quarter of its value.

Tesla is also having a strong week, up 14% as CEO Elon Musk said Wednesday that the company hit a key milestone on its AI5 chip.

A flurry of announcements from Intel has boosted its stock as well this month. The chipmaker is up 55% in April, after a historic nine-day run driven by partnerships with Google and Elon Musk’s companies.

Broadcom, Micron, Marvell and ON Semiconductor are also up around 30% so far in April.

The iShares Expanded Tech-Software ETF (IGV) is up about 15% week-to-date, pacing for its best week since October 2001. Anything better than 15.5% would mark its best week ever.

The SPDR Info Tech Fund (XLK) also hit an all-time high this morning for the first time since October 2025. The fund is on pace for its 13th straight day of gains, and its best week since April 2025.

The software sector has had a rough year due to AI disruption fears. Hopes for a lasting peace deal between the U.S. and Iran have fueled the sector’s recent rebound.

So far this year, the IGV is down about 20%.

Advanced Micro Devices reported fiscal third-quarter results that exceeded Wall Street expectations, but gave margin guidance was inline with estimates. The stock fell almost 5% in extended trading.

Here’s how the company did in comparison with LSEG consensus:

• Earnings per share: $1.20 adjusted vs. $1.16 expected
• Revenue: $9.25 billion vs. $8.74 billion expected

Revenue increased 36% from a year earlier in the fiscal third quarter, which ended on Sept. 27, according to a statement.

Net income climbed to $1.24 billion, or 75 cents per share, from $771 million, or 47 cents per share, a year earlier.

For the fourth quarter, AMD expects about $9.6 billion in revenue, implying 25% growth. That’s above LSEG’s $9.15 billion consensus. AMD sees an adjusted gross margin of 54.5% for the quarter, meeting StreetAccount’s consensus of 54.5%.

AMD, which is trying to keep pace with Nvidia in the market for artificial intelligence processors, said the guidance does not include revenue from shipments of its Instinct MI308 chips to China. Executives said the same thing last quarter.

As of Tuesday’s close, AMD shares were up 107% so far this year, while the Nasdaq is up 21%.

AMD reached a deal with OpenAI last month that could see the AI startup company take a 10% stake in the chipmaker. OpenAI will deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD’s Instinct graphics processing units over multiple years and across multiple generations of hardware, the companies said, beginning with an initial 1-gigawatt rollout of chips in the second half of next year.

For years OpenAI and other companies relied on graphics chips from Nvidia for running large-scale AI models.

“We expect this partnership will significantly accelerate our data center AI business with the potential to generate well over $100 million in revenue over the next few years,” AMD CEO Lisa Su said on a conference call with analysts. The AI business is on a path toward generating tens of billions in annual revenue in 2027, she said.

Also in October, Oracle announced plans to deploy 50,000 AMD Instinct MI450 AI chips in its cloud starting next year.

AMD’s data center business, which includes standard central processing units and GPUs for AI, generated $4.34 billion in fiscal third-quarter revenue, up 22%. Analysts polled by StreetAccount were looking for $4.13 billion.

Client revenue reached $2.75 billion, which was up 46% and more than StreetAccount’s $2.61 billion consensus. Revenue from gaming totaled $1.30 billion, up 181%. StreetAccount’s consensus was $1.05 billion.

Microsoft and Sony ramped up production of their respective Xbox and PlayStation video game consoles ahead of the holiday season, leading to growth in semi-custom chip revenue for AMD, Su said.

Amazon, a key cloud customer for AMD, disclosed in a Tuesday filing that it had sold all 822,234 of its AMD shares as of Sept. 30. Amazon built the position sometime in the first quarter.

Executives will discuss the results with analysts on a conference call starting at 5 p.m. ET.

This is developing news. Please check back for updates.

WATCH: AMD CEO on new $1 billion AI supercomputer partnership with the Department of Energy

Qualcomm announced Monday that it will release new artificial intelligence accelerator chips, marking new competition for Nvidia, which has so far dominated the market for AI semiconductors.

The stock soared 15% following the news.

The AI chips are a shift from Qualcomm, which has thus far focused on semiconductors for wireless connectivity and mobile devices, not massive data centers.

Qualcomm said that both the AI200, which will go on sale in 2026, and the AI250, planned for 2027, can come in a system that fills up a full, liquid-cooled server rack.

Qualcomm is matching Nvidia and AMD, which offer their graphics processing units, or GPUs, in full-rack systems that allow as many as 72 chips to act as one computer. AI labs need that computing power to run the most advanced models.

Qualcomm’s data center chips are based on the AI parts in Qualcomm’s smartphone chips called Hexagon neural processing units, or NPUs.

“We first wanted to prove ourselves in other domains, and once we built our strength over there, it was pretty easy for us to go up a notch into the data center level,” Durga Malladi, Qualcomm’s general manager for data center and edge, said on a call with reporters last week.

The entry of Qualcomm into the data center world marks new competition in the fastest-growing market in technology: equipment for new AI-focused server farms.

Nearly $6.7 trillion in capital expenditures will be spent on data centers through 2030, with the majority going to systems based around AI chips, according to a McKinsey estimate.

The industry has been dominated by Nvidia, whose GPUs have over 90% of the market so far and sales of which have driven the company to a market cap of over $4.5 trillion. Nvidia’s chips were used to train OpenAI’s GPTs, the large language models used in ChatGPT.

But companies such as OpenAI have been looking for alternatives, and earlier this month the startup announced plans to buy chips from the second-place GPU maker, AMD, and potentially take a stake in the company. Other companies, such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft, are also developing their own AI accelerators for their cloud services.

Qualcomm said its chips are focusing on inference, or running AI models, instead of training, which is how labs such as OpenAI create new AI capabilities by processing terabytes of data.

The chipmaker said that its rack-scale systems would ultimately cost less to operate for customers such as cloud service providers, and that a rack uses 160 kilowatts, which is comparable to the high power draw from some Nvidia GPU racks.

Malladi said Qualcomm would also sell its AI chips and other parts separately, especially for clients such as hyperscalers that prefer to design their own racks. He said other AI chip companies, such as Nvidia or AMD, could even become clients for some of Qualcomm’s data center parts, such as its central processing unit, or CPU.

“What we have tried to do is make sure that our customers are in a position to either take all of it or say, ‘I’m going to mix and match,'” Malladi said.

The company declined to comment, the price of the chips, cards or rack, and how many NPUs could be installed in a single rack. In May, Qualcomm announced a partnership with Saudi Arabia’s Humain to supply data centers in the region with AI inferencing chips, and it will be Qualcomm’s customer, committing to deploy up to as many systems as can use 200 megawatts of power.

Qualcomm said its AI chips have advantages over other accelerators in terms of power consumption, cost of ownership, and a new approach to the way memory is handled. It said its AI cards support 768 gigabytes of memory, which is higher than offerings from Nvidia and AMD.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure on Tuesday announced it will deploy 50,000 Advanced Micro Devices graphics processors starting in the second half of 2026.

AMD shares climbed about 2%. Oracle shares sank 4% while Nvidia was more than 3% lower.

The move is the latest sign that cloud companies are increasingly offering AMD’s graphics processing units as an alternative to Nvidia’s market-leading GPUs for artificial intelligence.

“We feel like customers are going to take up AMD very, very well — especially in the inferencing space,” said Karan Batta, senior vice president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Oracle will use AMD’s Instinct MI450 chips, which were announced earlier this year.

They are AMD’s first AI chips that can be assembled into a larger rack-sized system that enables 72 of the chips to work as one, which is needed to create and deploy the most advanced AI algorithms.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appeared with AMD CEO Lisa Su at a company event in June to announce the product.

Earlier this month, OpenAI announced a deal with AMD for processors requiring 6 gigawatts of power over multiple years, with a 1-gigawatt rollout starting in 2026. As part of the deal, and if the deployment goes well, OpenAI may end up owning as many as 160 million shares of AMD, or about 10% of the company.

In September, OpenAI entered into a five-year cloud deal with Oracle that could be worth as much as $300 billion.

OpenAI has historically been closely linked with Nvidia, whose chips were used to develop ChatGPT. Nvidia’s chips dominate the market for data center GPUs with more than 90% market share. Nvidia also invested in OpenAI in September.

But OpenAI leaders say the company needs as much computing power as possible, which means it needs AI chips from multiple suppliers. OpenAI also has plans to design its own AI chips with Broadcom.

“I think AMD has done a really fantastic job, just like Nvidia, and I think both of them have their place,” Batta said.

Tuesday at Oracle AI World, founder and Chairman Larry Ellison is set to take the stage and share his views on the latest OpenAI deal and what his company is doing to stay ahead of its main cloud competitors – Microsoft, Amazon and Google. 

“Oracle has already shown it is willing to place big bets and go all in to meet the AI moment. The company must now prove that beyond capacity, it can capitalize on its massive underlying data and enterprise capabilities … to add meaningful value to the enterprise AI wave,” said Daniel Newman, CEO of The Futurum Group, on the sidelines of Oracle’s conference.

AMD stock climbed 11% on Wednesday, continuing a massive run since OpenAI announced plans to buy billions of dollars of AI equipment from the chipmaker earlier this week.

On Monday, the ChatGPT maker entered into an agreement to potentially own 10% of AMD, based on its stock price and partnership milestones.

AMD now has a market cap of $380 billion after climbing 4% on Tuesday and 24% on Monday. Shares are up 43% so far this week, on pace for the best weekly gain since April 2016.

The partnership with OpenAI, which has historically been closely linked with Nvidia, has bolstered investor confidence that AMD will be a viable competitor to Nvidia in AI chips.

AMD CEO Lisa Su told reporters on Monday that the deal was a “win-win” and that its AI chips were good enough to be used in “at-scale deployments,” or very large data centers like the kind OpenAI and cloud providers build.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Wednesday reacted to the deal on CNBC’s Squawk Box, saying it was “surprising.”

“It’s imaginative, it’s unique and surprising, considering they were so excited about their next-generation product,” Huang said. “I’m surprised that they would give away 10% of the company before they even built it. And so anyhow, it’s clever, I guess.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Wednesday that he’s surprised Advanced Micro Devices offered 10% of itself to OpenAI as part of a multibillion-dollar partnership announced earlier this week.

“It’s imaginative, it’s unique and surprising, considering they were so excited about their next generation product,” Huang said in an interview with “CNBC’s Squawk Box.” “I’m surprised that they would give away 10% of the company before they even built it. And so anyhow, it’s clever, I guess.”

OpenAI and AMD reached a deal on Monday, with OpenAI committing to purchase 6 gigawatts worth of AMD chips over multiple years, including its forthcoming MI450 series. As part of the agreement, OpenAI will receive warrants for up to 160 million AMD shares, with vesting milestones based on deployment volume and AMD’s share price.

If OpenAI exercises the full warrant, the ChatGPT creator could acquire roughly 10% ownership in AMD.

The deal challenges Nvidia’s dominance in the AI chip industry, a market where AMD has sought to catch up, alongside cloud providers which are developing their own chips.

Nvidia late last month announced it planned to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI over the next decade. OpenAI agreed to build and deploy Nvidia systems that require 10 gigawatts of power, which Huang said at the time of the announcement is equal to between 4 million and 5 million graphics processing units (GPUs).