Intel and NVIDIA Pull the Market Up as Chipmakers Return to Favor

While we debate the latest capabilities of chatbots, the stock market is reminding us of a simple truth: all the magic of artificial intelligence starts with silicon. Today's pre-market trading in the US showed clearly where investors are putting their money. While software giants and gadget makers show sluggish movement, the companies responsible for the industry's "brains" are posting confident gains.

The biggest surprise was Intel, whose shares jumped more than 5%. Against the backdrop of a prolonged crisis and the company's attempts to restructure its business, such a leap looks like a strong vote of confidence. Why is this happening now?

Intel has long played catch-up, letting more agile competitors pull ahead. But recent news about the development of its foundry business and potential orders to manufacture chips for third-party companies is starting to change how the brand is perceived. If Intel was once seen as a lumbering giant of the last century, the market now sees a strategically important asset capable of securing domestic production amid global instability.

A 5% rise is not just a correction; it signals that investors are ready to believe in the return of a legend, provided it keeps its focus on AI infrastructure. NVIDIA is keeping pace too, adding more than 2%. It may seem routine for Jensen Huang's company, but at its market capitalization, every two percent is tens of billions of dollars in market value.

The market is still hungry for GPUs, and no reports of delays in new architectures can dull that appetite. NVIDIA has become a de facto "AI tax": any company that wants to build its own neural network has to pay it. As long as this status quo holds, the company's stock will remain the main barometer of the health of the entire tech industry.

Against this backdrop, the results of Google, Amazon and Microsoft look far more modest: all of them are up by less than half a percent. It is an interesting divergence: investors put more faith in those who sell the shovels than in those trying to dig a gold vein of new subscriptions and services with them. Cloud giants are spending enormous sums on hardware, and the market for now treats that spending as a risk rather than a guaranteed future profit.

This is the classic pattern of an infrastructure layer taking shape, where component makers skim the cream first. Apple and Meta (Meta) landed in the red zone. Declines of 0.

19% and 0.28%, respectively, are almost a statistical error, but the fact that they fell while the broader market rose is notable. Apple is still trying to convince the world that its approach to AI in smartphones will go mainstream, while Meta keeps burning billions on the metaverse and open LLMs.

Investors seem to have decided to pause and see how these ambitions turn into real cash. In a world where Intel rises 5%, simply being a "big tech giant" is no longer enough; you have to be part of the AI computing supply chain. The takeaway: the market has finally stopped valuing the IT sector as a single whole.

Now there are hardware favorites and everyone else. Can Intel sustain this pace, or are we watching a temporary spike driven by short-term expectations?

*Meta is designated an extremist organization and banned in Russia.