AI agents fuel fresh optimism around semiconductor demand.
- AMD crossed the $1 trillion market-cap milestone for the first time after a 10% surge.
- Arm and Intel also posted double-digit gains as investors bet on stronger CPU demand.
- Retail traders turned increasingly bullish on the chip rally, while some warned of exuberance.
Chip stocks surged sharply on Monday, with Intel, Arm Holdings and Advanced Micro Devices emerging as the top gainers on the Nasdaq-100, in a rally that appeared aided by the strong reception of Meta’s Muse AI and expectations that the agentic AI tool could drive greater demand for semiconductors and cloud services.
ARM stock rose 17.2%, INTC rose 12.1%, and AMD gained 10%. All three gained in the overnight session, with ARM leading the gains at 1.4%. The three companies are leading sellers of central processing units (CPUs), which are becoming increasingly central to the AI infrastructure.
AMD closed above a $1 trillion market capitalization for the first time, becoming the 14th U.S. company to reach the milestone, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
Global AI stocks rallied as well. Shares of South Korean chipmakers Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix were up about 3% early in the session on Tuesday, while Taiwan’s Taiex advanced 1.8% to a record.
Meta Muse Lights Up Chip Stocks
The rally followed the strong early reception for Meta’s Muse AI agent, which reached the top spot among free applications on Apple’s U.S. App Store following its launch earlier this month.
Sensor Tower data cited by Barron’s showed Muse had remained the most-downloaded free iPhone application in the U.S. for three consecutive days.
Meta shares also surged 11.4% Monday, marking their strongest session since April 2025.
Why AI Agents Could Boost CPU Demand
Investors are increasingly betting that the shift from conventional chatbots to autonomous AI agents could expand the computing required to run AI models, particularly during inference — the process of executing trained models to generate responses and perform tasks.
While GPUs remain central to AI workloads, agentic systems also require substantial general-purpose processing for inference, data orchestration, networking and enterprise workloads.
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said last week that the company could meet only about 50% of customer demand, highlighting supply constraints for CPUs.
Arm estimates the server CPU market could grow more than 35% annually to reach $120 billion by 2030. AMD has projected even faster growth, estimating that server CPUs could expand 50% through 2030 and create a $220 billion revenue opportunity.
Retail View On Chip Stocks
AMD was the top trending ticker on Stocktwits at the time of writing, with retail sentiment climbing to ‘extremely bullish.’ The sentiment for ARM and INTC was also ‘extremely bullish’ at the time of writing.
“$ARM raise your hand, veterans, who have seen this type of irrational exuberant market that is totally tethered from not only sector fundamentals or overall basic economic principles. $SOXX $META $USO,” a trader wrote, calling it, “Absolute bonkers market.”
Several traders also discussed booking profits. “$AMD do we lock in profit? Getting scary now it can’t keep go up with no major news other than 10% price increase,” said one.
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