The AI trade's price action has inverted: the companies that store bits are outrunning the companies that design the chips. Micron jumped more than 8 percent in a single session, SanDisk sits on a 650 percent gain since its split from Western Digital, and Nvidia has started the year flat while its market capitalization holds at $4.5 trillion.
CNBC's Jim Cramer reads that gap as rotation, not exhaustion. "When you get an employment report that's basically uneventful, it allows you to focus on what's really happening in the market," he said, describing money moving aggressively into overlooked corners, with data storage among the biggest beneficiaries. In his telling, Apple and Nvidia have become sources of funds rather than broken stories, and his advice is to own both rather than trade them. He points to storage and equipment names, Western Digital, SanDisk, Micron, Seagate and Applied Materials, as where the flows keep landing, and suggests a strong Taiwan Semiconductor report could shake sellers out of Nvidia.
The disconnect showed up in Nvidia's week. Shares fell more than 2.5 percent on Thursday even after reports that China will allow imports of its H200 chips, a decline Cramer attributed to the stock having rallied more than 10 percent off its mid-December lows. At CES, the company said its Vera Rubin platform is in full production, and finance chief Colette Kress said the $500 billion sales guide announced in October has "definitely gotten larger." Good news is no longer moving the stock, which is what rotation looks like from the inside.
Memory suppliers have the opposite problem: prices cannot keep up with the news. Micron's Tuesday surge followed forecasts that conventional DRAM prices could rise 55 to 60 percent quarter on quarter in the first quarter of 2026, with server DRAM above 60 percent and high-bandwidth memory up 50 to 55 percent. The company guided its next quarter to $18.7 billion in revenue, about $4.5 billion above consensus, after posting record free cash flow of $3.9 billion.
SanDisk tells the same story over a longer arc. The stock reached $275, up roughly 600 percent across 2025, as data center demand for NAND grows more than 40 percent annually and is set to overtake mobile as the largest consumer of flash for the first time in 15 years. Chief executive David Goeckeler credits an industry that now chooses to "invest to meet mid-teens annual growth rather than flooding the market with capacity," and the company guided gross margins to 41 to 43 percent, from 29.9 percent a quarter earlier.
Downstream, the buildout keeps paying assemblers too. Foxconn reported fourth-quarter revenue of NT$2.6 trillion, about $83 billion and up 22 percent year on year, ahead of the NT$2.4 trillion analysts expected, on strength in its cloud and components businesses. Whether the memory re-rating survives earnings season may depend on those DRAM forecasts holding; if they do, the rotation Cramer describes would still have room to run.
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