AMD has joined the US$1 trillion club — these AI stocks are surging with it

AMD has joined one of Wall Street’s most exclusive clubs. The chipmaker surpassed US$1 trillion in market value on Monday after its shares reached a record above US$613. AMD is now up about 185% in 2026, compared with roughly 16% for the Nasdaq Composite.

The milestone puts AMD alongside Nvidia, Broadcom and Micron as US semiconductor  companies that have reached trillion-dollar valuations.

But AMD’s rise is part of a much bigger move. Dell has gained more than 300% this year as AI-server orders surge. Arm Holdings is up around 140%, while Intel had already climbed more than 20% in September before the latest burst of buying.

The common thread is not simply exposure to artificial intelligence. Investors are increasingly rewarding companies positioned around the physical infrastructure required to run AI at scale — GPUs, CPUs, servers, networking and increasingly inference workloads.

AMD has become the closest major challenger in GPUs used for artificial-intelligence workloads, while also benefiting from rising demand for the CPUs paired with accelerators inside data centres.

AMD has also expanded beyond individual chips towards complete AI systems combining processors, networking and related hardware. Reuters said the company is gaining server CPU market share from Intel while accelerating its AI product launches.

Its latest results support the enthusiasm. Second-quarter revenue rose 50% to US$11.5 billion, while earnings increased 246% to US$1.66 per share. Wall Street currently expects full-year earnings growth of around 83%, followed by another sharp increase in 2027.

AMD had also recovered strongly before reaching the trillion-dollar mark. The shares climbed more than 26% from their early-August post-earnings decline before the latest rally.

The gains show where investors are seeing the clearest evidence that AI spending is turning into revenue, but they are being driven by very different businesses. AMD and Nvidia are tied to accelerators, Intel and Arm to CPUs and architecture, while Dell benefits from the servers needed to deploy that hardware.

For Australian traders, that creates distinct stock-specific exposures rather than one uniform AI trade. CFDs can provide long or short access to individual US technology stocks as those earnings, order and valuation trends diverge.

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SELL BUY

Dell offers one of the clearest examples of AI demand appearing directly in company results.

The company booked a record US$60.9 billion of AI-server orders in its latest quarter and finished with a US$95 billion backlog. Revenue jumped 58% to a record US$47 billion, prompting Dell to raise its annual revenue forecast from US$167 billion to US$192 billion.

Over the past 12 months, Dell has received more than US$130 billion of AI-server orders. Management also says demand is spreading into traditional servers, networking and storage as companies modernise data centres for increasingly intensive AI workloads. The stock had risen more than 300% in 2026 by early September.

Dell’s role also differs fundamentally from AMD or Nvidia. It does not need to design the best accelerator. It assembles the servers, storage and networking equipment required to put those chips to work.

That exposes it to AI spending regardless of whether customers ultimately choose Nvidia, AMD, or a mix of processors.

Dell now expects around US$74 billion of AI-server revenue in fiscal 2027, roughly three times the previous year’s level.

The next stage of AI spending is increasingly about running models at scale rather than simply training them. That shifts some attention towards CPUs, servers and other hardware used for inference as millions of users and businesses send requests through AI applications.

Intel is one beneficiary. Its shares gained roughly 22% between the start of September and September 18, while the company has said it can currently satisfy only around half of demand for some CPUs. Meta’s Muse AI agent has added to investor interest in inference after quickly becoming the most-downloaded free iPhone app in the US. Intel does not need to challenge Nvidia in high-end training chips to benefit if wider AI adoption drives more demand for server CPUs alongside accelerators.

Arm is pursuing a similar opportunity from a different position. The company already licenses processor architecture used across smartphones, servers and other devices, but is now developing its own AI chips. It is targeting US$2 billion in initial AI-chip sales, with a longer-term goal of US$15 billion, while its shares have risen around 140% in 2026. Greater AI deployment across data centres, devices and autonomous agents could increase demand for Arm-based processors alongside GPUs.

The share-price gains are being supported by unusually strong order growth across the infrastructure chain. Dell has built a US$95 billion AI-server backlog and says its AI customer base now exceeds 6,500, including more than 3,300 new AI Factory customers added over three quarters. Cisco has separately reported US$9.3 billion of hyperscaler AI infrastructure orders in 2026.

The spending is reaching several parts of the market at once. Nvidia and AMD supply accelerators, AMD and Intel benefit from server CPUs, Arm provides processor architecture, while Dell and Super Micro package much of that hardware into deployable systems. Networking and storage providers gain as larger workloads require more data to move between processors and data centres.

That helps explain why the strongest AI gains are no longer confined to one type of chip. Investors are rewarding companies that can show direct links between AI spending and orders, revenue or backlog.

The same numbers supporting the rally also raise the stakes. AMD is up about 185% in 2026, Arm around 140%, while Dell has more than quadrupled. Nvidia is valued above US$5 trillion, and AMD has now briefly crossed US$1 trillion.

AMD’s August earnings showed how demanding those valuations have become. The company forecast quarterly revenue above Wall Street estimates, yet its shares initially fell more than 7% because the outlook failed to clear even higher expectations. They subsequently recovered more than 26%.

With the Federal Reserve raising rates again, lofty technology valuations also face greater pressure from higher bond yields. AMD, Dell, Arm and Intel therefore need continued growth in AI orders and earnings to support gains that have already run far ahead of the broader market.

AMD’s trillion-dollar milestone captures the current trade well. Investors are paying heavily for companies that can turn AI deployment into measurable revenue, whether through accelerators, CPUs, servers or networking. The opportunity has widened across the infrastructure chain, but so have the expectations embedded in share prices.

• AMD’s next earnings: After reaching a US$1 trillion valuation, revenue and data-centre growth will need to keep pace with much higher expectations.

• AI-server orders: Dell’s backlog provides one of the clearest real-time measures of infrastructure demand.

• Inference growth: Rapid adoption of AI agents would support CPU demand alongside traditional GPU spending.

• Capital expenditure: Any pullback from the largest cloud companies would quickly affect expectations across chips, servers and networking.

Trading AI stocks with Mitrade

The AI infrastructure rally now includes companies with very different exposure to the same investment cycle.

Through Mitrade, eligible Australian clients can use CFDs to take long positions when expecting individual US shares to rise or short positions when expecting further weakness. That allows separate views across companies such as AMD, Intel, Dell and Nvidia rather than relying solely on the broader Nasdaq or semiconductor sector. 

Stop-loss and take-profit orders can define exit levels, while pending orders allow positions to open when a selected price is reached.

Accounts can be funded in AUD, and a demo account is available for testing strategies without committing real capital.

Mitrade is regulated in Australia by ASIC. CFDs are leveraged products, so both potential gains and losses can be magnified.

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