Ai-adjacent Stocks Continue Their Historic Tear

Even if you housed a Party Size bag of Tostitos Scoops every day for the rest of the year, you couldn’t approximate the bewildering and astonishing chip frenzy playing out in the global markets.

Here’s the order of magnitude we’re talking about:

• Intel, which sold a 9.9% equity stake of itself to the government last year after falling on hard times, is in a new world thanks to AI chip demand: It’s up 239% so far this year.
• American memory storage manufacturer Sandisk is up 558% YTD.
• South Korea’s Samsung surpassed a market cap of $1 trillion last Wednesday.

That’s helped the Korean Composite Stock Price Indexes, better known as Kospi, soar. It’s up 78% so far this year (for comparison, the S&P 500 is up 8%). And South Korea became the seventh-largest stock market on the planet last week, with a combined market cap of $4.59 trillion. It’s overtaken the UK and Canada since April 28.

But there may be trouble ahead: Jonathan Levin at Bloomberg wrote about how Kospi is becoming a “single-industry index,” as electric and electronic equipment makes up over half of it. In fact, two chip companies, Samsung and its rival SK Hynix, account for more than 40%.

What happens when chips meet dip?

“The party is best about a half-hour before the police shut it down,” a retired lawyer who’s been investing in chip stocks for more than a decade told the Wall Street Journal.

While some market-watchers note eerie parallels between this moment and the dot-com bubble—last week was the best for the PHLX Semiconductor index since the one ending March 10, 2000—others say there’s an important distinction this time around.

Zoom out: The WSJ noted that the biggest winners among stocks in the dot-com days didn’t really have any earnings to speak of. Micron is expected to finish the year with $77 billion in operating profit. Last week, Samsung reported an 8x increase in first-quarter operating profits, surpassing profits for the entire 2025 year, according to CNBC.—HVL