CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Monday marked the two-year anniversary of the current bull market with an ode to Nvidia and the U.S. semiconductor industry. “We have a remarkable semiconductor rally, and it is at the heart of this market,” Cramer said on “Squawk on the Street.” “One of the reasons why it’s so great is the dynamism of American capitalism is in semiconductors.” Shares of Nvidia, the leading designer of AI chips, soared 1,072% since the S & P 500 bottomed out on Oct. 12, 2022. The broad equity index entered Monday up 63% over that stretch and closed Friday at an all-time high. It is on pace for another one in Monday’s session. Other top S & P 500 stocks during the bull run include AI server maker and Nvidia partner Super Micro Computer , which rose 812%, and chipmaker Broadcom , which jumped 321%. Broadcom helps tech heavyweights, most notably Alphabet-owned Google , design specialty AI chips and also provides other products used inside data centers. Cramer’s Charitable Trust, the portfolio used by the CNBC Investing Club, owns Nvidia, Broadcom and Alphabet. The launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 proved to be a pivotal moment for the then-nascent bull market because it sparked an investment boom into generative artificial intelligence , the technology that underpins OpenAI-created chatbot. NVDA .SPX mountain 2022-10-12 Nvidia’s stock performance compared with the S & P 500 during the two-year bull market, which began on Oct. 12, 2022. Nvidia, whose chips were used to train ChatGPT on massive amounts of data, saw a massive influx of orders, leading to its soaring revenue, profits and stock price. As of Monday, Nvidia is the second-most valuable company in the world, at $3.4 trillion, behind only Apple, which is worth $3.5 trillion. Other parts of the broader AI hardware ecosystem benefited handsomely, as well. In addition to Super Micro, networking equipment provider Arista Networks and server maker Dell Technologies are among the top 15 stocks in the S & P 500 during the two-year bull market. Shares of Arista advanced 302%, good for No. 10, while Dell is No. 11, up 278%. “It’s more a halcyon time than people realize for our technology,” Cramer said. He said Nvidia’s chips, in particular, are enabling advancements at companies such as Meta Platforms , which is using AI to improve ad targeting and design on Instagram and Facebook. Meta is the seventh-best performing stock during the bull market, up 362% in that stretch. The company’s dramatic cost-cutting last year was a major driver of its stock performance, though its ability to harness AI to boost its financials is increasingly understood among analysts and investors. Amazon also has important ties to Nvidia, Cramer said, reflecting on his recent meeting with the chipmaker’s CEO and co-founder, Jensen Huang. The e-commerce giant’s cloud-computing unit, Amazon Web Services, is a buyer of Nvidia chips. “Amazon is the company that Jensen kept referencing to me as a great friend,” said Cramer, whose Trust also owns Amazon stock. “To be Nvidia centric is not wrong.”
