Pre-market rally for US semiconductor sector

Intel took the lead with its stock surge once expanding to 30%; AMD followed with an increase of over 10%, ARM rose by more than 8%, and Marvell Technology and TSMC both had gains approaching 4%.

The core catalyst for this market rally was Intel's Q1 2026 financial report. The company achieved $13.6 billion in revenue for the quarter, about $1.4 billion higher than the mid-point guidance and significantly exceeding market expectations.

This is mainly due to the strong pull of the AI infrastructure construction wave on the demand for server CPUs. The deployment ratio of CPUs to GPUs in data centers is returning from a previous 1:8 ratio to a 1:4 ratio, reflecting a renewed emphasis on general processing capabilities in computing architecture. At the same time, Intel's custom chip (ASIC) business is rapidly ramping up, with annualized revenue crossing the $1 billion milestone.

Foundry business has also achieved significant progress. Intel not only secured a long-term, large-scale order from Google but also announced a TeraFab strategic partnership with Elon Musk, exploring innovative foundry models and injecting a strong impetus into the company's foundry transformation.

The Server CPU Market is Facing a Historic Inflection Point

Bank of America estimates that the server CPU market size will be about $28 billion in 2025, reaching overall market space of over $71 billion by 2030, corresponding to a compound annual growth rate of approximately 15% from 2026 to 2030. Currently, CPUs account for about 5% of the total AI data center market size. Even with this relatively conservative estimate, the CPU market is stepping into a historic upward trajectory with a compound growth rate of 21%, from near zero growth.

Morgan Stanley's judgment is even more aggressive, projecting that the server CPU market will be about $24 billion in 2025 and that the overall data center CPU market size will reach between $82.5 billion and $110 billion by 2030. If we refer to NVIDIA's assumption of a $3 to $5 trillion AI infrastructure investment, the CPU market space could even hit between $206 billion and $458 billion.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang stated at the GTC 2026 conference that CPUs are no longer just supporting models; they are driving models. This judgment implies that, in the AI era, the strategic position of CPUs is being redefined, and a new round of industry cycles centered around CPUs and memory may have only just begun.