I have covered each of the following four stocks separately over the past few weeks:Micron‘s historic earnings. Intel’s painful turnaround. AMD‘s server CPU advantage heading into August 4. Applied Materials‘ wafer equipment supercycle. On July 21, Jim Cramer put them all in the same basket with a single post on X (formerly Twitter).
OK, if you have to, let’s go with Micron, AMAT and Intel/AMD for the ones I like the best….for this part of the food chain.
The phrase “this part of the food chain” is also a key framing. Cramer is not picking the companies spending the money but picking the ones getting paid.
Big Tech hyperscalers, including Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft, are on track to invest a combined $725 billion in AI infrastructure in 2026 alone, according to Forbes reporting.
Every dollar of that spending flows downstream to hardware suppliers, chip manufacturers, and the equipment companies that enable chip production. That is the food chain Cramer is referencing, and he is betting on the suppliers.
As of midday July 22, according to Yahoo Finance: Micron traded near $974, Applied Materials near $558, Intel near $104, and AMD near $556.
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Micron — the memory shortage that will not resolve for years
Yahoo Finance reports that Micron (MU) is up 241.46% year-to-date and ranks third on the S&P 500‘s year-to-date performance table, according to Slickcharts.
I sat through Cramer’s June 30 interview with CEO Sanjay Mehrotra and came away with one phrase that stuck: “tightness continues beyond 2027.”
The supply shortage is structural, not cyclical. AI data centers are projected to consume 70% of all memory chip production in 2026, according to The Motley Fool data, leaving smartphones, laptops, and cars competing for the remaining 30%.
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HBM3E and HBM4 are 100% sold out through calendar year 2027, with order books extending into 2028. Hyperscalers have committed $22 billion in advance cash deposits to secure supply, according to TheStreet.
DRAM prices rose by a percentage in the mid-60s sequentially in Micron’s fiscal Q2 alone. NAND prices jumped 70% in the same period as Micron’s first Idaho fab delivers wafers by mid-2027, with production ramping in 2028. Micron is also investing more than $250 billion through 2035 in U.S. manufacturing capacity.
Applied Materials — the equipment company behind every advanced chip
Applied Materials (AMAT) ranks 10th on the S&P 500 year-to-date table at 117%, according to Slickcharts. The company does not make chips. It makes the machines that make chips, which means every dollar of new fab capacity built by Micron, Intel, TSMC, or Samsung requires AMAT equipment.
I covered Citi‘s wafer fabrication equipment market estimates in a prior report. The bull case numbers are striking: $145 billion in WFE spending in 2026, growing to $200 billion in 2027 and $250 billion in 2028.
Related: Why Citi is still backing Applied Materials after the rally
For AMAT specifically, Citi modeled 30% revenue growth in calendar 2027 and 22% in 2028, including 35% and 25% growth from its Silicon segment.
The semiconductor industry as a whole is reporting 131% year-over-year earnings growth and 75% revenue growth in Q2 2026, according to FactSet‘s July 17 earnings insight.
If semiconductors were excluded from the Information Technology sector, the sector’s blended earnings growth rate would fall from 63.4% to 25.7%. AMAT captures the equipment spend, behind that entire growth story.
Intel — the geopolitical play and the 18A turnaround
Intel (INTC) ranks 6th year-to-date at over 180%, according to Slickcharts. I covered the latest layoff announcement on July 21, framing it as painful but necessary medicine. Q2 earnings arrive July 23.
Cramer’s Intel thesis rests on the foundry business and the geopolitical urgency of domestic chip manufacturing. Intel is the largest beneficiary of the U.S. CHIPS Act with $8.5 billion in direct subsidies.
Related: Intel makes another painful move in one of its key businesses
Intel Foundry revenues grew 16% to $5.42 billion in the most recent quarter, according to Intel’s Q1F26. Intel invests billions annually in R&D to perfect the 18A process node.
CEO Lip-Bu Tan confirmed in May that 18A yields are improving at approximately 7% per month, the best-practice benchmark, according to his Mad Money interview. Foundry customer commitments are expected to become “more concrete” in the second half of 2026, per CFO David Zinsner‘s prior commentary.
AMD — the server CPU advantage Goldman is betting on
AMD (AMD) ranks 7th year-to-date at 159%, according to Slickcharts. I covered Goldman Sachs‘ earnings preview on July 9 in detail, and the thesis is specific: the server CPU story is what wins August 4, not the GPU headline.
AMD guided 70% year-over-year growth in server CPU revenues for Q2. Goldman’s 2027 EPS estimate sits 13% above Street consensus, driven by a structural view that agentic AI is expanding CPU demand in ways the market has not yet fully priced, according to the same report.
Related: Goldman Sachs sees AMD entering earnings with 1 powerful advantage
The follow-on Verano 2nm CPU platform arrives in 2027 with a focus on AI performance per dollar per watt. AMD increased its server CPU total addressable market estimate to $120 billion by 2030, according to Lisa Su‘s Q1 earnings call commentary, which I highlighted in my previous report.
Bitget reports that UBS projects HBM demand to reach 33.1 billion gigabits globally in 2026, a 90% year-over-year increase, jumping another 77% in 2027.
The supply gap means available production will meet only about 60% of total market demand, according to analyst estimates. That imbalance benefits every company in Cramer’s food chain simultaneously — the memory makers, the equipment suppliers, and the chip designers.
His four picks are actually not a coincidence. They are the companies positioned directly in the path of the most powerful capital expenditure cycle in semiconductor history. Take notes.
Related: Jim Cramer shares strong verdict on IBM stock for investors
