AI investments move beyond Nvidia: the market changes the rules of the game

For three years straight, Wall Street lived by a simple formula: want to profit from the artificial intelligence boom — buy Nvidia. This strategy was so obvious and so profitable that it became virtually an axiom. The company's shares rose more than a thousand percent since the start of the AI rally, and Nvidia itself briefly became the world's most valuable company. But in February 2026, Bloomberg Markets Live analysts documented something many expected but few were ready to admit: the era of Nvidia as the sole proxy for AI investments has ended.

In a fresh episode of Bloomberg: The Opening Trade, a team of analysts led by Mark Cudmore broke down a key thesis that is gradually becoming consensus among institutional investors. AI trading hasn't died — it has evolved. Capital is no longer concentrated in a single point but is spreading across the entire value chain in the artificial intelligence industry. And this fundamentally changes the landscape for those managing portfolios.

To understand the scale of the shift, it's worth remembering how we got here. When ChatGPT launched the global AI fever in late 2022, the market reacted predictably — money flowed to those producing "picks and shovels for gold prospectors." Nvidia, with its dominance in the GPU market for neural network training, proved to be an ideal candidate. The company controlled more than eighty percent of the accelerator market for data centers; its chips were simply irreplaceable. Every quarterly report from Nvidia became an event for the entire stock market, and Jensen Huang in his leather jacket became the symbol of an entire era.

But markets don't stand still, and the AI industry doesn't either. Over the past year and a half, several structural changes have occurred that have eroded Nvidia's monopoly position as the sole beneficiary of the AI boom. First, competition in the chips segment has intensified to the limit. AMD has increased its share with its Instinct series accelerators, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have deepened their development of proprietary AI chips, and Chinese manufacturers, despite sanctions, have found workarounds. Nvidia still leads, but its market share no longer looks unshakeable.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, the AI market itself has transitioned from the "infrastructure building" phase to the "implementation and monetization" phase. When the industry was still buying GPUs by the thousands, all the profit indeed ended up with Nvidia. But now, as companies have started to genuinely earn from AI products, the investment logic has changed. Investors are looking at companies that use artificial intelligence to transform their business: from corporate SaaS providers integrating AI agents to industrial giants automating production. The profit from AI is being redistributed across the entire economy, and the stock market has begun to reflect this.

The third factor is the maturity of the technology itself. If previously the main limitation was "hardware" and computational power, today bottlenecks have shifted toward data, software, integration, and, importantly, energy. Companies building data centers, energy suppliers, developers of cooling systems — they have all become part of the expanded AI ecosystem. Investment banks one after another are releasing reports on the "second derivative" of AI trading, recommending paying attention to infrastructure players who until recently were not associated with the technology sector.

For Nvidia, this is not a catastrophe, but a serious challenge. The company remains fundamentally strong — demand for its products is high, new chip architectures continue to set the standard, and the CUDA ecosystem still creates a powerful lock-in effect. However, the multiples at which its shares trade can no longer grow at the previous pace when the market understands that AI is not a story of one company. Bloomberg analysts note that volatility in Nvidia shares has decreased while correlation with the broader technology index has increased. It is increasingly becoming "just" a large technology company rather than a unique bet on the future.

What does all this mean for the industry as a whole? Diversification of AI trading is a sign of market health, not weakness. When an entire investment theme depends on one stock, it creates systemic risks. The expansion of the circle of beneficiaries means that the AI boom acquires a sustainable economic foundation. Money goes where real value is created, not where it's easiest to place a bet.

The AI revolution hasn't ended — it has simply matured. And the market is finally beginning to understand this.