AMD, Intel, Micron and Corning Shares Rise as AI Infrastructure Spending Broadens Beyond GPUs

Advanced Micro Devices and Intel each gained about 25 percent this week while Micron jumped more than 37 percent and Corning climbed about 18 percent. All four stocks have more than doubled in value this year, with Intel leading at well over 200 percent.

Nvidia, the world's most valuable company, gained 8 percent this week and stands 15 percent higher in 2026 while analysts describe the moves as a changing of the guard in AI hardware.

Memory shortages have dominated recent trading. Micron, a 47-year-old company, blew past an $800 billion market capitalization for the first time this week and is now up over 750 percent in the past year. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra told CNBC in March that key customers are only getting 50 percent to two-thirds of their requirements because of supply issues.

The memory market is largely dominated by Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix, all of which are in the midst of historic rallies. Demand for central processing units has returned to 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.

AMD has long led the CPU charge in servers and its quarterly results this week exceeded estimates on earnings, revenue and guidance due to strong data center growth. AMD CEO Lisa Su said on the earnings call that AMD now expects 35 percent growth over the next three to five years in the server CPU market, up from the 18 percent growth the company forecasted in November.

"Agents are really driving 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.

Goldman Sachs analysts and Bernstein analysts upgraded AMD stock to a buy rating. JPMorgan Chase analysts said the AMD report crystallizes the structural inflection underway across both server CPU and datacenter accelerator growth trajectories.

U.S. Government, has staged a sharp revival. The stock had its best month on record in April, more than doubling, then rose 33 percent in the early days of May.

U.S. Devices. It climbed another 14 percent on Friday following a Wall Street Journal report that Intel and Apple have come to an agreement for Intel to manufacture some processors for Apple devices. Representatives from Intel and Apple declined to comment on the reported manufacturing agreement.

U.S. factories dedicated entirely to optical technologies for Nvidia. 2 billion in Corning.

Corning also inked a $6 billion deal with Meta through 2030 to provide fiber-optic cables in Meta's AI data centers. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC's Jim Cramer on Thursday that the Corning partnership will revitalize American manufacturing. "We're going to scale up optical at a scale that, quite frankly, no optical companies have ever enjoyed," Huang said.

Nvidia is expected to show revenue growth of 70 percent this fiscal year even as Wall Street rotates toward suppliers that were less visible in the early years of the AI buildout. CNBC reported that 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.