In today&#x27;s deep dive, Zaid breaks down the massive semiconductor rally that has Wall Street drawing comparisons to the dot-com bubble. Chip stocks just had their best month in 26 years, with AMD, Intel, and Micron all more than doubling in 2026. But is this a real supercycle or 1999 all over again?<br><br>Zaid covers what&#x27;s driving the surge, why AI demand has spread way beyond Nvidia, some of the biggest winners so far, and whether this rally has room to run or is about to hit a wall.<br><br>Check out our Sandisk deep dive: [YouTube][Spotify]

Deep Dive: Are Chip Stocks in a Bubble?

The Rundown

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** The Rundown

## Participants

- **Zaid Admani** (Public.com)

## Transcript

Welcome back to The Rundown for another Weekend Deep Dive. Today, we are talking about chip stocks. For the past few months, the big debate on Wall Street has been whether we're in the middle of an AI bubble. Big tech companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers, AI startups are fetching near trillion dollar valuation, and every company is trying to become AI native. But maybe the better question to ask now is whether semiconductor stocks are in a bubble.

Semiconductor stocks have been ripping over the last few weeks. So today we're breaking down why chip stocks are surging, why the rally has spread beyond NVIDIA, and whether this is the beginning of a real semiconductor super cycle or 1999 all over again. We got a great one for you today. Let's dive in. Chip stocks have been on a historic run over the last few weeks. The SOX Index, which tracks the 30 largest semiconductor stocks in the US,

is up more than 55% since the start of the year. And in April alone, the index rallied 40%, which was the best month for the index in 26 years, back during the peak of the dot-com bubble. We'll come back to that comparison a bit later. Now, this rally has been driven almost entirely by AI spending. And most of the AI spending is coming from the big four tech hyperscalers. I'm talking Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta.

Now, these companies reported earnings a couple weeks ago, and they said they plan to spend over $725 billion on capital expenditure this year. And most of that money is going towards building AI data centers. And for every one of these data centers being built, they need to be stacked with GPUs, CPUs, memory, networking chips, you name it. And that demand is showing up in the industry numbers.

The Semiconductor Industry Association reported that sales in 2025 topped $791 billion, which was up more than 25% from 2024. And things aren't slowing down this year. The association just reported that global chip sales hit $298 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone. That's up 25% from Q1 of last year. And in March alone, sales were up a staggering 79% compared to a year ago.

In fact, the industry is now on track to hit $1 trillion in global semiconductor revenue for the first time ever. To put this into perspective, the industry didn't cross $500 billion until 2021. So we've nearly doubled the revenue in just five years. And I think it's key to understand that this isn't just about demand being high. It's the fact that demand is so high that it's leading to bottlenecks across the supply chain.

You know, at the start of the AI boom a couple years ago, the bottleneck was GPUs, specifically NVIDIA's AI chips. Every company in the world wanted NVIDIA's chips, and that's how NVIDIA became the king of the AI boom and the most valuable company in the world today. But now the bottleneck has moved on to other parts o...

Deep Dive: Are Chip Stocks in a Bubble?

Transcript

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Deep Dive: Are Chip Stocks in a Bubble?

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.