Nvidia's stock slips as memory makers become AI's new darlings

Nvidia’s stock has dropped 15% since its May peak, even as revenue projections climb. The company is now cheaper relative to expected earnings than the average S&P firm. Meanwhile, memory makers like Micron are booming—Micron has nearly tripled in value. The GPU shortage that dominated headlines last year has eased, but data centers now face a memory bottleneck. High-bandwidth memory chips, which have improved incrementally for decades, suddenly command ten times their price from a year ago. The spot price for DRAM has surged since mid-2023, while the price for Nvidia’s H100 compute time has steadily fallen since May. This shift reflects a simple supply-demand imbalance: the industry underestimated how much memory the data center buildout would need. Why it matters: The AI trade is rotating from GPU makers to memory suppliers, signaling that the next phase of AI growth will be constrained by data storage and transfer rather than raw processing power.