Nvidia, Apple, and Microsoft Shares Could Rebound, Experts Say

Some of the largest technology companies in the market may wake up in 2026 after a recent decline, according to Melius Research.

Five of the “Elite 8” group—a set of mega-cap tech stocks—are down so far this year and lag the broader market, as growth stocks have been weighed down by geopolitical fears, high valuations, concerns around AI circular financing, and a broader market rotation toward smaller, value-oriented companies. The “Elite 8,” according to Melius, expands the well-known “Magnificent Seven” group by adding Broadcom to Nvidia, Tesla, Apple, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet.

Of these, Alphabet is the leader this year, rising nearly 6.5% as Wall Street backs Google’s leading position in artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, Apple and Broadcom shares have fallen more than 6%.

The rise in what Melius’ head of technology research, Ben Reitzes, calls the “shortage cohort”—AI component makers that are in short supply—has come at the expense of the big tech companies. Specifically, these companies benefit from a shortage of memory chips, a key consumer electronics component and a critical part of the infrastructure for building data centers.

This rotation, however, cannot continue indefinitely, according to Reitzes.

“Investors may follow the shortage for a while longer, but the fundamentals for most in the Elite 8 remain very strong and they are unlikely to lag for long,” Reitzes wrote in a note to clients on Monday.

“The eight largest tech companies have been roughly flat since November 1… There are many excuses—need for broader growth (lower rates), AI fatigue, and higher component costs. In this context, there was a strong rotation to the ‘shortage cohort’—DRAM, HDD, CPU, and NAND stocks, while the Russell 2000 has outperformed the S&P 500 by over 650 basis points year-to-date,” the analyst continued. “Can Nvidia, Broadcom, and Microsoft shares rebound? We still think yes.”

Reitzes believes that with rising spending on local servers and storage—in some cases up to 50% this year—more companies will want to move to the cloud for both AI and traditional workloads, where price increases are more manageable. This, in turn, should benefit companies like Nvidia, Broadcom, and Microsoft, which offer cloud services.

“Even traditional Microsoft cloud prices are rising, and Nvidia GPU instances are becoming more expensive on Amazon,” Reitzes explained, adding that he has observed price increases for Nvidia’s H100 and H200 chips at major cloud companies following the release of Anthropic’s latest AI model, Claude Opus 4.5, in November. “The AI computing surge at Anthropic should boost revenues for Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.”

“If cloud revenues rise, capital expenditures will also increase—not just for DRAM and components,” Reitzes concluded.