The second wave of the AI rally

In my article published on 16th April, I documented the volatility among the Magnificent Seven stocks over the previous months as well as the ceasefire rally at the start of April which triggered strong gains for the three principal benchmark indices in the US.

The upturn across the S&P 500, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Nasdaq has continued since then with all indices reaching a sequence of fresh record highs.

Between 31st March and the most recent record close on 14th May 2026, the S&P 500 advanced from 6528.9 points to an all-time high of just above 7,500 points, a gain of 14.9 per cent in just six weeks.

The Nasdaq Composite closed at a high of 26,635 points on the same day, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed above the 50,000-point level again closing at 50,063 points on 14th May. The S&P 500 is now showing a year-to-date gain of circa 8 per cent and a year-on-year gain of close to 25 per cent.

Beyond Nvidia

Although a number of the Magnificent Seven stocks have performed very positively over recent weeks (principally Alphabet with an upturn of 37 per cent since the end of March, closely followed by Amazon with a gain of 27 per cent), the semiconductor sector is essentially the largest contributor to the strong gains across the broader market in the past few weeks.

Nvidia, which had dominated the first phase of the AI trade and is still the largest company within the US equity market, is effectively synonymous with the semiconductor sector. Nvidia’s graphics processing units have defined the architecture of the modern AI data centres and the name is now used almost interchangeably with the AI trade itself.

The share price of Nvidia has also performed positively since the end of March and rallied 8 per cent last week following news that US regulators had approved the sale of its H200 AI accelerators into China.

However, the current euphoria in the equity market is now centred among various semiconductor manufacturers apart from memory and storage manufacturers, optical-component makers and a host of other AI enablers.

The three chipmakers driving the rally

Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and fibre-optic cable manufacturer Corning have each more than doubled in value since the start of 2026.

The biggest mover by far has been Intel, which is up almost 200 per cent in 2026 and has registered its best month on record in April, more than doubling in value, and adding a further 33 per cent in the first few days of May.

Intel rallied 13 per cent in a single session this month after Bloomberg reported that Apple was in discussions with Intel and Samsung to manufacture the main processors used in its US devices. The share price jumped a further 14 per cent a few days later after the Wall Street Journal reported that a manufacturing agreement between Apple and Intel had been concluded.

During the course of 2025, there were a number of strategic transactions that led to a re-rating of the equity.

In August 2025, Intel secured a USD2 billion private placement from SoftBank followed by an unprecedented USD8.9 billion direct equity investment from the US government later than same month. Subsequently, on 18th September 2025, Nvidia announced a USD5 billion investment into Intel

During the start of May, Cerebras Systems, an AI chip company, conducted the largest initial public offering since the start of the year in the US. The company is widely described as a direct challenger to Nvidia. The share price of Cerebras Systems surged by as much as 109 per cent during intraday trading on its debut last week and ended its first trading session up 68 per cent, pushing the company’s market capitalisation above USD100 billion.

The memory and storage supercycle

Alongside the three chipmakers mentioned above, the manufacturers of flash memory and mass-capacity storage have emerged as another important theme during the second wave of the AI rally.

Micron Technology has been one the single greatest beneficiaries of the current AI capex cycle. The market capitalisation has surged to over USD850 billion representing a gain of over 160 per cent since the start of the year and an extraordinary upturn of over 700 per cent over the past twelve months.

Likewise, SanDisk Corporation, which was spun-off from Western Digital in February 2025, has emerged as the standout performer of the S&P 500 in 2026, with the share price advancing by 490 per cent and in excess of 1,200 per cent over the past twelve months.

Moreover, the share price of Seagate Technology, the world’s largest manufacturer of hard-disk drives, has advanced over 188 per cent in 2026 and in excess of 600 per cent over the past twelve months.

The wider AI beneficiaries

The AI build-out, which involves combined capital expenditure exceeding USD700 billion in 2026 from among some of the companies within the Magnificent 7, requires a vast supporting ecosystem of energy infrastructure, cooling technology, optical components, real estate, and grid equipment.

Companies within these sectors have also been among the very strong performers in recent weeks.

Artificial intelligence is now the dominant driver of the stellar returns of many of the global equity markets. During the first phase of the AI rally, this was heavily concentrated among Nvidia and a small number of mega-cap technology platforms.

This has now broadened into several other companies including Intel, Micron Technology, SanDisk, Seagate, Broadcom, Cisco and several others.

Equity markets have always been characterised by inevitable volatility. The sharp recovery over the past six weeks pushing indices into record territory despite the geopolitical uncertainty is another clear illustration of the difficulties in timing the market.

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