3 of the Top 5 Performers in the S&P 500 in the First Half Offer 1 Particular Thing for AI Customers. (Hint: It Isn't the GPU, and Nvidia Isn't Among Them.)

The article says the first-half leaders in the S&P 500 were not the usual AI chip winners like Nvidia, but memory and storage companies benefiting from AI data needs. It highlights Sandisk, Micron, and Western Digital as three of the top five performers, driven by surging data center demand. Recent results were strong: Sandisk’s data center revenue jumped more than 640% year over year, Micron’s data center revenue rose more than 650% to $11 billion, and Western Digital’s total revenue increased 45% to over $3 billion. The piece argues that as AI shifts from training to inference and agentic use cases, the need for memory and storage will expand further. Overall, the article frames memory/storage as an increasingly important second wave of AI infrastructure investment, with continued long-term upside despite Nvidia still being central to the AI ecosystem.