AMD and Taiwan Cicadas lead chip prices as AI investment boom continues

On Wednesday, semiconductor stocks benefited from the artificial intelligence investment boom and rose almost across the board.

AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) shares rose more than 3% after the company announced an agreement to acquire European artificial intelligence laboratory Silo AI. Due to the transaction of 0.6 billion65 million dollars in full cash, semiconductor giant AMD will shoot another arrow in view of further competition with NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) in the AI field.

As part of the deal, Peter Sahlin, CEO and co-founder of Silo AI, will continue to lead the Silo AI team, and the team will become part of the AMD AI Group. The acquisition is expected to be completed later this year.

The stock price of Taiwan Semiconductor (NYSE: TSM) rose 2.7% after global foundries reported earnings in June, which were supported by AI and greatly exceeded expectations.

Taiwan Semiconductor announced that sales in June were 207.8 billion 70 million Taiwan dollars, up 32.9% from the same month last year. Semiconductor foundries, which manufacture chips such as NVIDIA and AMD, added that sales for the first half of the year surged 28% to 1.2 billion Taiwan dollars, up 28% from the same period last year.

NVIDIA's stock price rose more than 2%, partly due to good financial results from Taiwan Semiconductor. Nvidia's competitor Groq is a startup specializing in chips designed to run large-scale language models, and is close to raising $300M of funding with a valuation of $2.2B, The Information reported.

Other AI-focused semiconductors, such as Broadcom (AVGO), which is scheduled to have a 10-1 stock split on July 15, also rose on Wednesday. Micron (MU) and Qualcomm (QCOM) also rose.

Semiconductor manufacturing equipment manufacturer MKS Instruments rose when Bank of America “bought” the company and began coverage with a target stock price of 160 dollars.

Applied Materials (AMAT), Lam Research (LRCX), ASML (ASML), and KLA Corporation (KLAC) also rose.

Other semiconductor stocks such as ON Semiconductor (ON), NXP Semiconductors (NXPI), Texas Instruments (TXN), and Analog Devices (ADI) also showed a steady rise.