SK Hynix and Micron crossed the one trillion dollar valuation threshold for the first time on Tuesday, as booming demand for artificial intelligence memory chips reshaped global market dynamics and pushed world equities to another all-time high.
The milestone, which sent semiconductor stocks surging and lifted US stock futures while European futures traded mixed, is drawing fresh attention to a deeper structural shift playing out beneath the surface of global markets. Analysts and investors are increasingly moving their focus beyond the companies building AI models toward those controlling the hardware infrastructure the entire AI economy depends on.
Nigel Green, Chief Executive Officer of global financial advisory firm deVere Group, argues that the surge marks a decisive turn in how capital is being allocated across the AI trade. “Wall Street spent the past two years believing Nvidia was the AI trade,” Green said. “Now the market is starting to realise the real power may sit deeper in the supply chain.”
The core of that argument rests on the role of high-bandwidth memory chips. Without them, AI systems cannot operate at the speed or scale that the world’s largest technology companies require. Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Google are each locked into an escalating race for compute power, semiconductor access and memory capacity, and that competition has fundamentally altered how markets value memory manufacturers. What was once treated as a volatile cyclical commodity is rapidly being repriced as a strategic asset.
Green draws a pointed comparison to oil, not because memory resembles energy as a product but because access to AI infrastructure is beginning to function like a gatekeeper to economic power, corporate competitiveness and increasingly national security. Governments across major economies are already classifying semiconductors as strategic assets. Corporations that cannot secure adequate compute capacity risk falling structurally behind rivals.
The investment implications are significant. A relatively narrow cluster of semiconductor and AI-linked stocks now accounts for a disproportionately large share of global equity gains, lifting broader indices even as other sectors face weaker growth and compressed margins. Green warns that current valuations rest heavily on the assumption that AI spending continues accelerating for years, a scenario he says may prove correct but whose concentration risk investors should not ignore.
His broader message is that the market has already rotated. Investors still positioned around the first wave of the AI trade, centred on model builders and consumer-facing AI products, may be looking in the wrong direction as capital consolidates around the infrastructure layer underneath the entire industry.
