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

Apple and Intel are reportedly closing in on a deal that would see Intel make some of the chips for the iPhone maker’s devices, marking a major shift in the chipmaking landscape.

Talks between the two companies have been brewing for more than a year, with a preliminary agreement reached in recent months, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.

Intel shares soared nearly 14% on Friday. Apple shares added 2%. Both companies declined to comment.

“I 100% believe this is going to happen. I don’t know when,” chip analyst Ben Bajarin of Creative Strategies said in an interview.

If it comes to fruition, the deal would be the most notable vote of confidence yet for Intel’s once-struggling chip foundry business. Intel shares are up more than 200% this year.

For Apple, it would be the end of era. The iPhone maker currently relies solely on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. to make all the most advanced chips for its devices.

But TSMC’s wafer capacity can only go so far, amid soaring demand for AI chips that has sent every major tech company into a semiconductor frenzy. Apple is no exception, ramping up its in-house silicon program in recent years to make nearly all the core chips in iPhones, Macs and more. Apple is TSMC’s second-largest customer, topped only by Nvidia, according to Bajarin.

“Intel is the only place that can scale up capacity as a viable second source,” Bajarin said.

Intel is indeed ramping up capacity quickly, with a new chip fabrication plant now in high-volume production in Chandler, Arizona. It’s making chips there on 18A, its most advanced node, or production process, which is meant to rival TSMC’s 2nm node that’s currently only manufactured in Taiwan. TSMC also has multiple new chip fabs in Arizona, where Apple has committed to making some of its silicon.

Bajarin said Apple is most likely to wait to make chips on Intel’s next node, called 18A-P, which could scale as soon as next year. He called Intel’s current 18A node “a little bit rough” and said 18A-P “cleans a lot of stuff up.”

For years, Intel’s foundry business faced delays and low yields that cast doubt on its ability to manufacture chips for others. For now, Intel remains the only major customer of its foundry business, making central processing units and other chips for its own devices.

Bajarin said those days are over.

“They’ve got through the rough patch and can now be considered validated as a credible second source,” he said.

Intel’s only other major external customer commitment for foundry is unlikely to see real results until 2029 or beyond.

Elon Musk said last month that he plans to rely on Intel’s future 14A chip node at his $119 billion Terafab planned for Austin, Texas, which is meant to make chips for Tesla, SpaceX and SpaceXAI. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said in February that 14A will be in volume production in 2029.

Intel already has major customers — such as Amazon and Cisco — for the advanced packaging side of its chipmaking business, in which individual chip dies and memory are bonded together to make things like a graphics processing unit.

An Apple-Intel deal won’t impact TSMC because “they’re already printing wafers as fast as they can,” Bajarin said. Still, TSMC shifted its rhetoric last month when President and CEO C.C. Wei called Intel a “formidable competitor.”

“If you’re about to have one of your largest customers probably sign a deal with a competing foundry, that would be the kind of thing you say to perhaps soften the blow,” Bajarin said.

Apple executives have also reportedly visited Samsung’s new chip manufacturing plant under construction in Texas, where CNBC got an early look. Samsung, Intel and TSMC are the only three companies in the world capable of manufacturing the most advanced chips needed for AI, and “nobody can build fast enough,” Bajarin said.

WATCH: How Samsung became the world’s second biggest advanced chipmaker

Options traders can’t get enough of semiconductor stocks. No matter how high they go or how expensive the options get, bulls just keep flooding the space.

After a 700% rally the past year, traders poured into Micron options Tuesday, paying expensive premiums to get access to further upside in the legacy memory-chip maker that became one of the market’s hottest AI trades over the past year.

More than $2.8 billion of Micron options premium changed hands Tuesday as of noon Chicago time, eclipsing the dollar-amount traded in index ETFs SPY and QQQ combined. Micron accounted for 12 of the top 20 options trades in the hour after the opening bell, according to data from SpotGamma — a major feat for a stock with no big newsflow and earnings months away.

Call volumes outpace puts on the stock, and call premiums dwarf the amount paid for puts. More calls were bought than sold, and more puts sold than bought on Tuesday, according to ThinkOrSwim, as implied volatility in the stock rose to 84 — roughly five times the volatility in the S&P 500.

Call-buyers ranged from deep in-the-money to out-of-the-money strikes, with the biggest trades leaning toward later-dated expiries that bet on a sustained move in Micron, whose market cap surpassed $700 billion.

Conviction in Micron was mirrored by traders in related names such as SanDisk and Western Digital, where call-buying dominated the action as those respective stocks hit all-time highs.

In another major market cap milestone, Intel on Tuesday surpassed its dotcom value, nearing a $550 billion valuation after a 13% pop that brings its one-year run to more than 430%.

Semiconductor stocks are powering the U.S. equity market to records in recent days and traders are predicting that means a big swing in shares of Intel after earnings after the bell Thursday.

Options are pricing in a $6.23 move on the report, a roughly 9% swing. That wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for the chipmaker: Shares slid as much as 18% after reporting fourth-quarter earnings in January before staging a 50% rally just this month alone.

The semiconductor group is up 145% in the past year, and Intel’s been a key leader, climbing more than 230% over that period.

The catch is, the stock has dropped after three of its last four earnings reports.

Sentiment looks like it’s shifting more bullish this time around. There are about as many puts trading as calls, but options traders are paying beefier premiums in upside calls, with total call premiums nearing $100M versus $50M in puts, according to data compiled by SpotGamma.

One big bullish trader this morning spent $2.2 million buying 3,200 $70 strike calls expiring June 18. Given the stock’s recent history of dropping after earnings, that seems less like a bet on the direction Friday and more that the stock will find footing in its long-term uptrend that’s been in play since last summer.

Intel shares jumped 10% on Wednesday after the U.S chipmaker announced it would repurchase the 49% equity interest it did not own in its Fab 34 chip facility in Ireland for $14.2 billion.

The semiconductor company sold the 49% stake in its Ireland manufacturing facility to buyout firm Apollo Global Management in 2024 for $11.2 billion.

“Our 2024 agreement was the right structure at the right time and provided Intel with meaningful flexibility, enabling us to accelerate critical initiatives,” Intel CFO David Zinsner said in a press release. “Today, we have a stronger balance sheet, improved financial discipline and an evolved business strategy.”

The move is a sign that the company is back on solid footing with renewed confidence.

When Intel sold its stake in 2024, it was a very different time for the U.S. chipmaker. The company was in the midst of a $100 billion investment to expand chipmaking in the U.S., including a massive chip fabrication plant, or fab, that opened in Arizona last year.

After years of falling behind chipmaking leader Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., former CEO Pat Gelsinger went all in on Intel’s foundry ambitions in the U.S. He was ousted at the end of 2024, but Intel’s Arizona chip factory project remained on track.

Intel said the repurchase agreement is “underpinned by the growing and essential role CPUs play in the era of AI.”

Intel is known for making industry-leading PC and server central processing units, or CPUs, but has a different business model from most chipmakers.

While other leaders like Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia outsource the complex and expensive manufacturing of their silicon, Intel both designs and manufactures its own chips — with hopes of manufacturing for others, too.

At Fab 34 in Ireland, Intel manufactures PC and server CPUs using less advanced chip nodes than what it makes in Arizona, but a renewed need for CPUs is driving demand across the board.

Intel told CNBC that its strongest demand right now is for server CPUs, including its latest Xeon 6 CPU made in Ireland.

Nvidia recently told CNBC that CPUs are “becoming the bottleneck” as agentic artificial intelligence changes compute needs.

Futurum Group called it a “quiet supply crisis,” predicting the CPU market growth rate could exceed the growth of GPUs, or graphics processing units, by 2028.

While GPUs are ideal for training and running AI models because their thousands of cores can perform many operations simultaneously, CPUs have a smaller number of powerful cores running sequential general-purpose tasks. Agentic AI requires a lot of general compute power, with large amounts of data moving around across multiple agents.

In the latest signals of the CPU renaissance, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unveiled an entire rack filled only with Vera CPUs earlier this month, and U.K. chip architecture firm Arm Holdings introduced its first in-house chip — also a CPU.

Intel now manufactures chips at its most advanced node, 18A, in Arizona but has yet to secure a major external customer. For now, Intel is its own primary customer, making its Core Ultra series 3 PC processor at that plant.

In Ireland, Intel makes earlier generations of its PC processor, and manufactures its latest server CPU on Intel 3, the generation preceding 18A. 

Intel 3 is the second generation of chip technology that the company makes using ASML‘s extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. These EUV machines are also used to manufacture 18A, opening up the possibility that Intel could produce more advanced chips in Ireland down the road.

Intel told CNBC there are no plans for 18A at Fab 34 in the near term. 

The Ireland fab is also crucial to a different step in the chipmaking process called advanced packaging, which is required to connect the individual chips to larger systems like a circuit board. Intel told CNBC it does a portion of the advanced packaging for its 18A chips at the Ireland fab.

Correction: David Zinsner is CFO of Intel. An earlier version misspelled his name.

In addition to running Intel, Lip-Bu Tan is chairman of artificial intelligence chipmaker SambaNova, which he first invested in eight years ago. Now Intel is pumping money into the startup as it tries to take on industry leader Nvidia.

SambaNova, a maker of chips for running generative AI models, has agreed to adopt Intel server chips and graphics cards in a multiyear collaboration, according to a Tuesday release. Intel is also participating in a $350 million funding round, after initially investing in SambaNova in 2019.

For years, Nvidia’s graphics processing units have been the silicon of choice for AI model companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, which kickstarted the AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. While Nvidia has been the leading beneficiary of the AI craze and is now the world’s most valuable publicly traded company, Intel’s revenue has declined for four straight years.

Intel is now assembling its own graphics card, Tan said at a Cisco event earlier this month. The stock is up 75% in the past year, largely thanks to massive investments from the U.S. government and Nvidia.

But to become a real player in the AI chip market, Intel needs help. The company previously looked at buying SambaNova for $1.6 billion but talks fell apart, Bloomberg reported in January.

SambaNova counts Hugging Face, Meta and major AI labs as customers. With the new partnership, Intel and SambaNova will work together on sales and marketing to boost adoption.

“We’re not doing all this overnight,” Rodrigo Liang, SambaNova’s co-founder and CEO, told CNBC in an interview. “It’s not like we’re showing up tomorrow with all these things ready, but it’s something that we are doing some good planning work to make sure that we’re actually working this out, and then we’re delivering more streamlined solutions.”

Intel and SambaNova declined to comment on whether the two companies discussed an acquisition.

Tan became SambaNova’s chairman in 2017. Walden International, the venture firm he started in 1987, placed an early bet on the startup, alongside Google’s venture arm. Tan recused himself from discussions about the collaboration, an Intel spokesperson said.

SambaNova is touting a new chip called the SN50 that Liang said delivers higher performance than the GPUs in Nvidia’s B200 systems, based on Blackwell, and provides more computing power for the same price. The company says customers can connect up to 256 of the processors together.

SoftBank, a leading investor in OpenAI, will deploy the SN50 and is an existing SambaNova customer, the startup said.

Liang said SambaNova is well aware of Nvidia’s dominance, but he sees room for other players.

“I think we have to be realistic about the fact that Nvidia is pervasive today, as far as kind of what people like to use, but there are new technologies that are coming out that are going to run those really, really efficiently,” he said. “And if you route that traffic in a heterogeneous environment, like most people are starting to do, you know you’re going to get much better value out of the infrastructure.”

SambaNova wants to expand its own cloud for running AI models and is looking to sell clusters that companies can run in their data centers.

SambaNova’s other investors include private equity firm Vista Equity Partners, Battery Ventures, Cambium Capital, Qatar Investment Authority, Seligman Ventures and T. Rowe Price.

WATCH: Intel still a massive turnaround story that got ‘way over its skies’, says Bernstein’s Stacy Rasgon

Intel, which now counts the U.S. government as its largest shareholder, said on Tuesday that it will match the Trump administration’s $1,000 payout for children of eligible U.S. employees.

The matching funds, which is a benefit for Intel staff, mark the latest sign of a close working relationship between the Trump administration and Intel after the government took a 10% stake in the chipmaker last year through an $8.9 billion investment.

The 530A program, often called “Trump Accounts,” passed as part of the administration’s “big beautiful bill,” and is intended to jumpstart wealth-building opportunities for children, allowing their investments to grow and compound for years before they become adults.

“America’s future technologists will define the next era of innovation, and the Trump Accounts program helps give them an early financial foundation,” Lip-Bu Tan, Intel CEO, said in Tuesday’s statement.

Intel is joining a list of other companies that say they will match the federal $1,000 contribution. They include SoFi, Charter Communications, BNY, BlackRock, Investment Company Institute, Robinhood and Charles Schwab.

The program allows parents to open tax-advantaged investment accounts for children under 18, with kids born between 2025 and 2028 getting seed funding of $1,000 from the government. Employer contributions up to $2,500 don’t count as taxable income. Parents will be able to open the accounts in July.

In December, Dell founder Michael Dell said he would donate $6.25 billion to the program, to seed some Trump Accounts for children born before the Jan. 1 cutoff with $250.

WATCH: Intel still a massive turnaround story

Intel shares plunged 14% Friday after the chipmaker issued lackluster guidance and warned of a supply shortage.

During a fourth-quarter earnings call with analysts on Thursday, CEO Lip-Bu Tan said the company wouldn’t be able to meet full demand for its products. He said production efficiency, or yield, is also below his targets.

“We are on a multiyear journey,” he said. “It will take time and resolve.”

The chipmaker expects first-quarter revenue to range between $11.7 billion and $12.7 billion, and breakeven adjusted earnings per share. That was below LSEG expectations for earnings of 5 cents per share and $12.51 billion in revenue.

Over the last year, Intel shares have rallied more than doubled on hopes of a turnaround for the embattled American chipmaker, following investments from the U.S. government, SoftBank and Nvidia.

The company’s foundry business has long underperformed competitors, which are profiting massively off of the data center artificial intelligence boom.

Investors were looking for clarity on foundry customers as the next momentum mover for the stock. The company’s foundry business creates chips for other companies.

CFO David Zinsner told CNBC that Intel expects customers for its next-generation 14A technology to appear in the second half of the year.

But analysts at RBC Capital Markets warned that a “meaningful revenue contribution” from 14A customers may not pop up until late 2028.

“We appreciate the recent excitement around opportunity for INTC but still don’t see a clear path forward given further share loss, no AI strategy and unclear fab/packaging opportunities,” wrote analysts at Jefferies.

Despite the soft outlook, Intel topped Wall Street’s fourth-quarter earnings and revenue expectations.

WATCH: BofA’s Vivek Arya on Intel: We see no reason to buy a stock at 90x P/E