Lisa Su, president and CEO of AMD, during an interview with Mad Money, broadcasting from CNBC’s San Francisco bureau on November 21, 2019.
Jacob Jimenez | CNBC
The big winner for investors this year in the generative AI boom has been Nvidia. The company’s stock price rocketed 234% as demand soared for the chipmaker’s processors that are designed to handle the hefty compute loads required to train and run large language models.
The LLMs from Microsoft-backed OpenAI and others relying on Nvidia’s technology can turn users’ text-based prompts into pictures, poems or PowerPoint presentations.
While Nvidia sucked up the bulk of the profits — net income through the first three quarters of the year jumped sixfold from 2022 — it wasn’t the only stock that attracted Wall Street’s attention in the race to make money from artificial intelligence.
Software vendors CrowdStrike, HubSpot and Salesforce all at least doubled this year, far outperforming the Nasdaq, which was up 43% as of Friday’s close. Those companies got a boost after announcing enhancements that draw on generative AI.
But when it comes to the hardware and infrastructure underlying the advancements in AI and ensuring that there’s enough capacity going forward, investors are looking at who, other than Nvidia, stands to gain. The iShares Semiconductor ETF has rallied 64% this year. The data center is another source of optimism, and a few cloud service providers are positioned to win business as organizations boost spending on technology to help them run generative AI services.
Here are three other stocks gaining momentum due to the generative AI wave:
AMD
As the company whose technology is viewed as most likely to challenge Nvidia’s AI chip monopoly, Advanced Micro Devices has a big cheering section in the software developer community. The stock is up 116% for the year as of Friday’s close.
AMD just launched its MI300X AI processors, pursuing a market for AI chips that CEO Lisa Su projects will climb to $400 billion over the next four years. Meta announced in December its plans to use the new processors, and Microsoft is also a committed customer.
Su pointed to performance advantages in comparison with Nvidia’s H100 chip.
“AMD remains extremely well positioned to take advantage of the rapidly expanding AI TAM, as they continue to stack up customer partnerships and roll out products with impressive (and extremely competitive) performance metrics,” Deutsche Bank analysts wrote in a note to clients after the announcement earlier this month.
Since its public market debut almost a decade ago, Arista has been gaining on Cisco in the market for data center networking gear. Excitement around its position in AI helped push the stock up 96% this year.
President and CEO of Arista Networks, Jayshree Ullal.
Scott Mlyn | CNBC
In October, Arista added AI to a key customer segment so it’s now called Cloud and AI Titans. More than 40% of the company’s 2022 revenue came from Meta and Microsoft. The following month, Arista CEO Jayshree Ullal announced a goal of $750 million in 2025 AI networking revenue, prompting Citi analysts to lift their price target on the stock to $300 from $220.
Companies have been choosing Arista hardware to connect their GPUs to the internet. As models get bigger and workloads more complex, Arista has an opportunity to connect GPUs to one another to help scale the technology.
Arista executives see a moderation in enterprise spending in 2024 after years of cloud expansion, with organizations testing out systems before making large-scale AI deployments that could start in 2025.
Cloudflare
For years, Cloudflare has ensured that online content can be quickly served up to end users by creating a global network of data centers that protects websites from attempted takedowns.
One key customer is OpenAI. When a user attempts to access OpenAI, Cloudflare’s technology verifies that it’s a person and not a bot on the other end. The company is now aiming to become part of the fabric for running AI models and ensuring rapid response. In September, the company announced a service called Workers AI, which runs on Nvidia’s GPUs and will be spread across 100 cities.
“With a consumption pricing model, these services could drive meaningful upside to revenue as adoption ramps through 2024,” Morgan Stanley analysts, who have the equivalent of a hold rating on the stock, wrote in a November report.
Jeremy Allaire, co-founder and CEO of Circle, speaks at the 2025 TIME100 Summit in New York on April 23, 2025.
Jemal Countess | TIME | Getty Images
Stablecoin issuer Circle stands to be one of the first significant cryptocurrency companies to go public in the U.S. That’s not the only unusual aspect of its IPO.
In Circle’s updated prospectus on Tuesday, the company said it would sell 9.6 million shares in the offering, while existing shareholders would sell 14.4 million shares. It’s exceedingly rare in a tech IPO for more shares to come from investors than the company.
Facebook was one of the few notable exceptions. In the social network’s massive 2012 IPO, which raised a then-record $16 billion, 57% of the shares were sold by existing stakeholders. Circle is even higher at 60%.
Circle, the company behind the popular USDC stablecoin, didn’t provide a reason for its decision, and a spokesperson declined to comment. The company is profitable, having generated $64.8 million in net income in the latest quarter. It had almost $850 million in cash and equivalents, and stands to raise another $240 million in the IPO, based on the midpoint of its expected range of $24 to $26 a share, according to Tuesday’s filing.
One reason for the hefty amount of insider sales is likely the extended stretch of meager returns for venture capital firms. After the market peaked in 2021, soaring inflation led to increased interest rates, pushing investors out of risk and forcing late-stage tech companies to forego IPOs, often slashing their valuations to raise money in the private market. Wall Street was bullish on an IPO boom when President Donald Trump took office in January, but few debuts have taken place.
Add it all up, and Silicon Valley’s tech investors are badly in need of liquidity.
“Private investors are desperate for exists so they can distribute back to their investors,” said Lise Buyer, founder of IPO consultancy Class V Group, though she said she isn’t certain of the company’s motivations. “It probably reflects a multiyear drought in IPOs and a strong desire by early investors to get some liquidity.”
Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire, who co-founded the company in 2013, is offloading about 8% of his stake, selling 1.58 million shares, according to the prospectus. Sean Neville, a co-founder and former co-CEO, is slated to sell 11%, as is finance chief Jeremy Fox-Green.
Venture firms Accel, Breyer Capital, General Catalyst, IDG Capital, and Oak Investment Partners are all scheduled to sell about 10% of their stock. While insider sales could present a troubling signal to Wall Street, Buyer said the investors’ remaining holdings show they’re still expressing belief in the company.
“The big guys are holding enough so they still have skin in the game, so that shouldn’t alarm investors,” Buyer said.
For most tech IPOs over the years, the percentage of float coming from investors has been significantly below half. In Reddit’s IPO, insiders sold 31% of the shares. The percentage was 36% for online grocery delivery company Instacart in 2023.
Sometimes it’s much less than that. CoreWeave, a former cryptocurrency miner that now rents out Nvidia chips, went public in March, with executives and other shareholders making up 2.4% of the shares sold. Back in December 2020, Airbnb investors accounted for about 3% of IPO shares, and in DoorDash’s IPO that same week, existing investors didn’t sell any stock.
During times when IPOs are hot and stocks are flying after their debut, investors are incentivized to hold and pocket the gains after the lockup period expires. That’s not today’s market, which helps explain why half the shares sold in stock brokerage firm eToro’sIPO earlier this month came from existing investors.
Exit activity for U.S. VCs rose almost 35% last year to $98 billion after hitting the lowest in a decade in 2023, according to the National Venture Capital Association and PitchBook. The peak was over $750 billion in 2021.
“This continuation of the post-2021 liquidity drought highlights persistent issues around exit pathways and investor behavior,” the NVCA wrote in its annual yearbook, which was published in March.
In some cases, companies need insiders to sell stock just so there’s enough float for there to be a market for trading. If Circle wasn’t including investors in its share sale, it would be offering less than 5% of outstanding shares to the public. For eToro that number was 7%.
A sign is posted in front of the 23andMe headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, on Feb. 1, 2024.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
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23andMe said it will file a Form 25 Notification of Delisting with the SEC on or around June 6, which would subsequently remove the stock from listing and registering with the Nasdaq.
The company said the Nasdaq had originally informed the company that a Form 25 would be filed in March, but since the exchange has not yet submitted the filing, 23andMe is doing so voluntarily.
23andMe exploded into the mainstream because of its at-home DNA testing kits that allowed customers to examine their genetic profiles. At its peak, the company was valued at around $6 billion.
But after going public via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company in 2021, the company struggled to generate recurring revenue and stand up viable research or therapeutics businesses.
Regeneron’s deal is still subject to approval by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Missouri. Pending approval, it’s expected to close in the third quarter of this year.
Elon Musk listens as reporters ask U.S. President Donald Trump and South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa questions during a press availability in the Oval Office at the White House on May 21, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images
Tesla shares gained about 5% on Tuesday after CEO Elon Musk over the weekend reiterated his intent to home in on his businesses ahead of the latest SpaceX rocket launch.
The billionaire wrote in a post to his social media platform X that he needs to be “super focused” on X, artificial intelligence company xAI and Tesla as they launch “critical technologies” on the heels of a temporary outage.
“As evidenced by the uptime issues this week, major operational improvements need to be made,” he wrote, adding that he would return to “spending 24/7” at work. “The failover redundancy should have worked, but did not.”
An outage over the weekend briefly shuttered the social media platform formerly known as Twitter for thousands of users, according to DownDetector. Earlier in the week, the platform suffered a data center outage. X has suffered a series of outages since Musk purchased the platform in 2022.
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Musk has previously indicated plans to step away from his political work and prioritize his businesses.
During Tesla’s April earnings call he said that he would “significantly” reduce his time running President Donald Trump‘s Department of Government Efficiency.
In the last election cycle, Musk devoted time and billions of dollars to political causes and toward electing Trump in 2024. However, a story over the weekend from the Washington Post, citing sources familiar with the matter, said that Musk has grown disillusioned with politics and wants to return to managing his businesses.
Last week, Musk said in an interview at the Qatar Economic Forum that he planned to spend “a lot less” on campaign donations going forward.
The comments from Musk precede SpaceX’s Starship rocket Tuesday evening. Pressure is on for the company after two Starship rockets exploded in January and March.
Ahead of the launch, Musk announced an all hands livestream on X at 1 p.m.
Tesla is still facing fallout from Musk’s political foray, with protests at showrooms and other brand damage.
In April, Tesla sold 7,261 cars in Europe, down 49% from last year, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association.