By Kevin Stankiewicz
Publication Date: 2026-02-18 19:32:00
Meta Platforms ‘ pledge to spend billions of dollars on Nvidia chips is a much-needed shot in the arm for the AI semiconductor giant and its recently middling stock. Nvidia’s scorching multiyear rally had cooled off in recent months, as investor dollars moved into other buzzy corners of the chip market like memory and storage, and Google’s impressive AI models built on its in-house chips fanned competition concerns. But now, Meta’s commitment to Nvidia should remind the market of Nvidia’s technology advantages and its central role in the broader AI buildout. “Nvidia has been such a drag on this market that you begin to start a new narrative, which is that we just don’t go after Sandisk and Western Digital and Micron over and over and over again,” Jim Cramer said Wednesday on CNBC. Instead, he said, traders and investors may start to say, “Let’s go back to the ones with great intellectual property.” On that list of IP powerhouses, Nvidia is at the top of the heap. “It’s just a change of scenery” that could be in order, Jim said. Shares of Nvidia rose more than 2% on Wednesday, outperforming the S & P 500 . So far in 2026, however, the stock has gained just over 1%, slightly ahead of the broader market. The two charts below help illustrate just how much the scenery within the semiconductor landscape had changed compared with the early years of the AI boom, when Nvidia’s cutting-edge processors, known as graphic processing units (GPUs), were the hottest commodity in…
