CNBC’s Jim Cramer said Tuesday felt like a vintage day on Wall Street after Samsung’s earnings sent chip stocks tumbling and megacaps that have lagged for much of the year rebounded.
“Today it looked like the old days, when we realized that you needed an Nvidia chip to calculate things … When the stocks of Google, Meta, and Amazon had enough strength to carry this market. When Apple needed no one and wasn’t worried about commodity chip prices,” said the “Mad Money” host.
The move followed Samsung’s earnings report Tuesday local time, which sent shares of the Korean electronics giant down 7%. Cramer said the results were “superb but not superb enough,” raising new questions about demand for its products, particularly memory chips.
According to Cramer, investors quickly extrapolated Samsung’s results across the broader AI hardware ecosystem, sending shares of companies tied to the physical buildout of data centers sharply lower. Idaho-based Micron, one of Samsung’s few competitors in the memory market, fell 4.7%.
What caught Cramer’s attention, however, was where investors put their money instead.
Rather than abandoning technology altogether, he said investors turned back into several of the megacap companies that had struggled for much of the year, including Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Apple, and even Nvidia. Enterprise software names such as Salesforce, Adobe, and ServiceNow also attracted buyers. Cramer’s Charitable Trust, the portfolio run by CNBC’s Investing Club, owns shares of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Nvidia and Salesforce.
Cramer said the reversal may reflect a growing view that the AI supply chain trade has become crowded, while many of the companies funding the data center buildout have become more attractive after months of underperformance.
Tech giants like Amazon, Alphabet and Meta “have all had a miserable time of it for the better part of the year,” he said.
Whether the session marks the beginning of a lasting shift remains to be seen, Cramer added, but he said Tuesday’s trading stood out because leadership changed so dramatically.
“Today may have been day one of a larger move. Or maybe it was nothing. But it sure felt like a change to me,” he said.
