Nvidia shares have climbed 17 percent this year to roughly $218, extending a run that saw the stock multiply nearly thirteenfold between 2023 and 2025. Micron has posted a steeper recent ascent, gaining 239 percent in 2025 and another 242 percent so far in 2026. The two moves reflect different pressure points in the data-center build-out: one company sells the engines, the other supplies the fuel tanks those engines cannot run without.
The engine maker broadens the platform
Nvidia's split-adjusted price rose from about $14 to $186 during the 2023-to-2025 period, a trajectory that made it the world's most valuable company by market capitalization. The chipmaker has since used that currency to buy into every layer of the AI factory. A $2 billion stake in Marvell Technology came with a seat inside NVLink Fusion, letting Marvell's custom accelerators plug directly into Nvidia's rack-scale stack. Separate $2 billion checks went to Coherent and Lumentum, each backed by purchase commitments for lasers and silicon photonics that replace copper links in expanding clusters. A $1 billion investment in Nokia targets AI-enabled radio access networks, extending the same accelerated compute to the telecom edge. Relationships with neocloud operators Nebius and CoreWeave help finance customer build-outs while keeping those data centers on Nvidia systems.
The memory bottleneck tightens
Micron is one of three suppliers that dominate global DRAM and high-bandwidth memory production. As training clusters grew and inference workloads intensified, HBM supply became a binding constraint. Price spikes followed, and the stock responded. The company's growth outlook appears sharper than Nvidia's for the near term, according to the analysis, because memory scarcity is currently dictating the pace at which new capacity can come online.
Competition arrives on both fronts
Advanced Micro Devices is scaling its GPU business. At the same time, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud are developing custom application-specific integrated circuits that could reduce reliance on merchant silicon. The analysis concludes that Nvidia's broader platform, spanning compute, networking, optics, software, and customer financing, positions it more durably across the full infrastructure cycle, even if Micron's percentage gains look larger in the current window.