{"id":33614,"date":"2026-05-10T11:13:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-10T11:13:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/33614\/"},"modified":"2026-05-10T11:13:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-10T11:13:11","slug":"markets-love-chasing-bottlenecks-wall-street-weighs-epic-run-in-ai-stocks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/33614\/","title":{"rendered":"Markets ‘love chasing bottlenecks’: Wall Street weighs epic run in AI stocks"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Semiconductor stocks leading the S&P 500 (^GSPC<\/a>) and Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC<\/a>) to record highs have one common thread: They sit at the bottlenecks of the artificial intelligence trade.<\/p>\n

It used to be that Nvidia (NVDA<\/a>) graphics processing units (GPUs) \u2014 the primary engines of the AI boom \u2014 were hard to get.<\/p>\n

But advancements in agentic AI are now accelerating demand for CPUs, or central processing units, on which agents perform tasks and generate outputs. Unlike chatbots that respond to prompts, AI agents can work on tasks autonomously for hours.<\/p>\n

\u201cOver the last several quarters, we’ve seen a new demand driver, which is really agentic AI workloads, which is really optimized better for server CPUs instead of GPUs,\u201d KeyBanc Capital Markets analyst John Vinh told Yahoo Finance last week.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s been a boon for CPU makers like Intel (INTC<\/a>) and AMD (AMD<\/a>) as those stocks hover at all-time highs. Such is the demand that Nvidia unveiled its Vera CPU in March, positioning it as a competitor in the data center market.<\/p>\n

\u201cMarket investors \u2014 whether hedge funds, retail investors, what have you \u2014 they love chasing bottlenecks,\u201d Angelo Zino of CFRA told Yahoo Finance last week.<\/p>\n

Read more:\u00a0How to protect your portfolio from an AI bubble<\/a><\/p>\n

The other growing bottleneck is the silicon memory inside AI infrastructure.<\/p>\n

Micron (MU<\/a>) stock hit all-time highs last week as memory demand has gone through the roof. Samsung (005930.KS<\/a>), the world\u2019s largest memory manufacturer, recently joined the $1 trillion market cap club. SK Hynix (000660.KS<\/a>) also hit all-time highs.<\/p>\n

Big Tech players Meta (META<\/a>), Microsoft (MSFT<\/a>), and Apple (AAPL<\/a>) all discussed the rising cost of memory.<\/p>\n

\u201cMemory makers have been able to structure these long-term agreements with hyperscalers that is going to support, we think, a valuation re-rating on these memory stocks going forward,\u201d Vinh said.<\/p>\n

Analysts say the rush to produce high-bandwidth memory for AI chips is reshaping the entire semiconductor supply chain, including storage chips like those made by Sandisk (SNDK<\/a>), which has rallied more than 400% year to date.<\/p>\n

\"Minister Government officials visit the data center of French company OVHcloud in Roubaix, northern France, on April 3, 2025. (SAMEER AL-DOUMY\/AFP via Getty Images) \u00b7 SAMEER AL-DOUMY via Getty Images <\/p>\n

The third bottleneck is optics, as the industry advances toward moving data within chip infrastructure using light, or photons, rather than electricity.<\/p>\n

Last week, Nvidia announced a partnership with Corning (GLW<\/a>). The chipmaker has also made investments in Coherent (COHR<\/a>) and Lumentum (LITE<\/a>). Shares for those companies are also at all-time highs.<\/p>\n

Bulls point to an AI-driven cycle that could extend the recent rally far longer. The tech industry is just starting to scratch the surface of robotics and autonomous systems, which are expected to be the next major drivers of AI.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you think about these bottlenecks, how long they\u2019re going to go on for, the odds are they\u2019re probably going to go on for at least into 2027, potentially even longer than that, especially on the memory side,\u201d CFRA\u2019s Zino said.<\/p>\n

Wall Street is still expecting higher markets this year, driven by strong earnings growth. Ahmed Riesgo, Insigneo\u2019s chief investment officer,\u00a0told Yahoo Finance last week that he sees opportunities for growth in names like Alphabet (GOOGL<\/a>, GOOG<\/a>) because of the company\u2019s push into TPU chips, cloud growth, and Gemini AI product.<\/p>\n

UBS analysts last week also mentioned tech stocks as a way to continue investing in the markets.<\/p>\n

\u201cInvestors can also broaden exposures to megacap tech across the enabling, intelligence, and application layers of the AI value chain, including semiconductors and chipmaking equipment, power and resources, and infrastructure, \u201c UBS analysts wrote.<\/p>\n

Ines Ferre is a Senior Business Reporter for Yahoo Finance covering the US stock market, publicly traded companies, and commodities. She has reported live from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq.<\/p>\n

Click here for the latest technology news that will impact the stock market<\/a><\/p>\n

Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Finance<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Semiconductor stocks leading the S&P 500 (^GSPC) and Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) to record highs have one common thread:…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":33615,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[179,21491,24,25,21488,21490,21489,1103,58,3446],"class_list":{"0":"post-33614","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ai","8":"tag-agentic-ai","9":"tag-agentic-ai-workloads","10":"tag-ai","11":"tag-artificial-intelligence","12":"tag-bottlenecks","13":"tag-cfra","14":"tag-keybanc-capital-markets","15":"tag-nasdaq-composite","16":"tag-nvidia","17":"tag-semiconductor-stocks"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33614"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33614\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}