AI infrastructure stocks Lumentum, Celestica and Seagate beat Nvidia 2025

Nvidia has been the biggest infrastructure winner in the artificial intelligence boom, growing in value nearly thirteenfold since late 2022 to a market capitalization of $4.6 trillion.

As Nvidia’s rally has continued into 2025, investors betting on other AI data center plays have made significantly more money over the past 12 months.

As four of the biggest tech companies plan collective spending of 380 billion dollars on the construction of data centers and infrastructure this year, followed by a increase In the years to come, Wall Street poured money into a cadre of sellers poised to reap the rewards.

Makers of memory, storage, fiber-optic cables, central processors and other types of enterprise hardware have soared this year, driven by enthusiasm over the AI ​​craze.

Investors will be watching these five companies closely in 2026, now that big expectations have been priced into their shares.

Lumentumbased in San Jose, California, manufactures switches, transceivers and other laser optical parts needed for fiber optic cables. Customers are typically telecommunications operators and device manufacturers like Applewhich previously used Lumentum parts in its FaceID sensor.

But AI servers also need lots of optical connections. Each graphics processing unit in a rack must be connected to all other GPUs. Future AI systems will be scalable, requiring rack-to-rack optical connections. Eventually, entire data centers will need to be connected to each other using fiber optic connections.

Lumentum’s stock price jumped 372% this year as of Wednesday’s close, pushing the company’s market capitalization past $28 billion. Sales jumped 58% in the latest quarter from a year earlier, to $533 million.

“Our growth is fueled by demand for AI spanning our laser chips and optical transceivers in data centers, as well as the interconnected long-haul networks that connect them,” Lumentum CEO Michael Hurlston said during a November earnings conference call. He said 60% of the company’s sales now come from cloud infrastructure and AI.

Revenue is expected to rise 58% for the fiscal year ending in June, but analysts expect it to slow from there to growth of 32% and 15% over the next two years, according to LSEG.

Western digital is one of the three major manufacturers of hard drives, with Seagate and Toshiba. Shares of the 55-year-old company are up nearly 300% this year.

In addition to computing power, AI companies increasingly need space to store applications and other data. In short, data centers need hard drives.

While Western Digital makes solid-state hard drives, which use chips to store data, the company is best known for its hard drives, which use spinning disks to store terabytes or more of data.

“Data is the fuel that powers AI, and it is hard drives that provide the most reliable, scalable and cost-effective data storage solution,” CEO Irving Tan said in October during an earnings conference call. He cited the example of a hospital that uses AI that analyzes 7 billion images.

In the most recent quarter, revenue increased 27% to $2.82 billion. The company says selling more storage for data centers will improve profitability as AI companies need larger, more expensive hard drives.

Revenue is expected to grow about 23% in fiscal 2026, with growth slowing to 13% in 2027.

In February, Western Digital expanded its Flash business. Sandiskwhich now has a market capitalization of around $35 billion, more than half the value of Western Digital.

Micron is one of three major memory producers, alongside Samsung and SK Hynix, but the only one based in the United States

AI servers need a lot of memory to store and process massive AI models. Nvidia chips or Advanced microdevices come with tens of gigabytes of the most advanced memory, called high-bandwidth memory. Chipmakers are taking over all memory production capacity, leading to a global shortage and driving up prices.

Micron blew away Wall Street sales and earnings estimates in its quarterly report last week, and the stock is now up 241% for the year.

Sumit Sadana, Micron’s chief commercial officer, said the company is “beyond sold out” of its memory chips. In December, it even shut down its consumer line of memory and SSDs to save AI supply.

Morgan Stanley analysts said in a December note that Micron’s results showed the best revenue and profit growth in “the history of the U.S. semiconductor industry” outside of Nvidia.

Revenue is expected to nearly double in the year ending in August, before slowing significantly to 24% in fiscal 2027 and less than 1% in 2028, according to LSEG.

Seagatefounded nine years after Western Digital, also benefits from booming demand for storage. The stock is up 231% this year.

Sales rose 21% to $2.63 billion during the company’s fiscal third quarter, which ended Oct. 3. The company said at the time that 80% of its sales were to the data center market.

“There is no doubt that AI is reshaping the demand for hard drives by increasing the economic value of data and data storage,” CEO Dave Mosley said on a call with analysts.

Seagate is unlikely to have additional hard drives in stock, Bank of America analysts wrote in November, because any additional shipments will be claimed quickly. Analysts also noted that customers are signing make-to-order contracts with firm volume and price commitments.

“Additional units are typically purchased by hyperscale or other mass-capacity customers,” wrote the analysts, who recommend buying the stock.

Seagate’s trajectory resembles that of Western Digital. Analysts expect revenue growth of 21% this fiscal year, followed by increases of around 15% and 6% over the next two years, according to LSEG.

Celesticafounded in 1994 as IBM subsidiary, manufactures switches that connect networks together and manage the data and traffic that passes through them.

The stock is up more than 230% this year.

The company sells many of its switches to larger AI buyers. Sales rose 28% in the third quarter to $3.19 billion. Analysts expect revenue growth to increase from 26% this year to 33% in 2026 and 34% in 2027, according to LSEG.

Celestica CEO Robert Mionis said on an October conference call that a hyperscaler had recently approached the company about building parts to connect liquid-cooled rack computers for AI, and said mass production is expected to begin next year.

A boon for Celestica is growing demand for custom chips called ASICs, which are less flexible than GPUs but can be less expensive to operate for specific AI applications.

“Our largest and fastest growing market presence is in AI data centers, supporting high-performance networks and custom ASIC AI/ML compute platforms,” Mionis said.

Goldman Sachs analysts wrote in a note Friday that Celestica supplies parts for Google ASIC.

“The company is expected to benefit in 2026 from being the leading provider of rack-level Google TPU solutions,” the analysts write.

WATCH: Expect a trend toward AI efficiency in 2026