I have been watching the AI boom unfold for the last three years and figured I should write down what I am seeing before the dust settles. Future-me will thank present-me for the bookmark.
What kicked it off
ChatGPT landed in late 2022. By early 2023 every serious tech company was scrambling to ship something with “AI” stamped on it. The capital markets noticed, and a small group of stocks took off like nothing I had seen in years.
The biggest movers
- NVIDIA (NVDA) — the obvious one. Their GPUs became the picks-and-shovels of the AI gold rush. Roughly an 11x move since the start of 2023.
- Palantir (PLTR) — quietly the biggest winner of all. Their AIP platform caught on with enterprise and government clients, and the stock is up around 23x since 2023.
- Broadcom (AVGO) — custom AI silicon for hyperscalers like Google and Meta. Crossed a trillion-plus market cap on the strength of that business.
- TSMC (TSM) — manufactures basically every advanced AI chip on the planet. The picks-and-shovels of the picks-and-shovels.
- AMD (AMD) — the credible second source for AI accelerators. The MI300 line gave hyperscalers a reason to diversify away from NVIDIA.
- Microsoft (MSFT) — bought a front-row seat via OpenAI and turned Azure into the default place to run frontier models.
- Meta (META) — not a pure AI play, but their open-weights Llama strategy and ad-targeting wins re-rated the stock dramatically.
What I take away from it
Two patterns keep showing up. First, infrastructure beat applications: the companies selling chips, foundries, and cloud capacity printed money before most application-layer startups had a working business model. Second, the winners traded at valuations that looked insane the whole way up, and going up anyway. That is uncomfortable but worth remembering.
I am not making predictions about 2026 and beyond. I just want to remember what the past three years actually looked like, so when the next cycle starts I have a reference point.