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Wires and cables in a server room. Thomas Northcut | Digitalvision | Getty Images
Nvidia has been the biggest infrastructure winner in the artificial intelligence boom, soaring in value by almost thirteenfold since the end of 2022 to a market cap of $4.6 trillion. While Nvidia's rally continued in 2025, investors betting on other AI data center plays made a lot more money over the past 12 months. With four of the biggest technology companies projecting collective expenditures of $380 billion on data center and infrastructure build-outs this year, followed by an expected increase in the coming years, Wall Street has poured money into an assortment of vendors that are poised to reap the rewards. Makers of memory, storage, fiber-optic cables, central processors and other types of enterprise hardware have rocketed in valued this year, driven by excitement around the AI craze. Investors will be scrutinizing these five companies closely in 2026 now that lofty expectations have been built into their stock prices.
Lumentum
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Lumentum , based in San Jose, California, makes switches, transceivers and other optical laser-based parts that are needed for fiber-optic cables. Customers have typically been telecommunications carriers and device makers like Apple , which previously used Lumentum parts in its FaceID sensor. But AI servers also need a lot of optical connections. Every graphics processing unit in a rack needs to be connected to every other GPU. Future AI systems will scale out, which requires optical connections from rack to rack. Eventually, entire data centers will need to be connected to each other with fiber-optic connections. Lumentum's stock price has jumped 361% this year, lifting the company's market cap past $27 billion. Sales surged 58% in the most recent quarter from a year earlier to $533 million. "Our growth is powered by AI demand spanning our laser chips and optical transceivers inside data centers, as well as the interconnected long-haul networks that link them," Lumentum CEO Michael Hurlston said on an earnings call in November. He said 60% of the company's sales now come from cloud and AI infrastructure. Revenue is expected to rise 58% for the fiscal year ending in June, but analysts see a slowdown from there to growth of 32% and 15% in the next two years, according to LSEG.
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