In NVDA Vs. AMD, One Stock Has Emerged Clear Winner — But What Can You Expect Next In Chipmakers' AI Race?

Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ: NVDA) stock has been a runaway winner this year, thanks to the company's head start in the field of artificial intelligence. But Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMD) has shown intent to catchup and create its own space in the hot-and-happening technology area.

Against this backdrop, here's a look at how an NVDA Vs AMD head-to-head stock match-up compares:

NVDA vs. AMD: A Comparative Analysis

Nvidia rebounded from 2022's weakness and began to rally at the start of the year, and since then, there has been no looking back. By virtue of the breathtaking rally, the chipmaker is now the top-performing S&P 500 stock of the year and the best-performing mega-cap tech stock. It has clocked a gain of over 275% over the past year.

The weakness that was seen in Nvidia in 2022 was primarily due to the economic slackening that began to manifest in the wake of the Fed's monetary policy tightening that began in March of that year. Mid-year, the company was caught in the crossfires of U.S.-China tensions as the U.S. banned sales of high-performance chips to China, which happens to be one of the major customers of the Santa Clara, California-based company.

All these changed with the coming of age of OpenAI's ChatGPT, which began to gain popularity with the launch of the GPT-3 version of the chatbot in late November. Software giant Microsoft Corp.'s (NASDAQ: MSFT) incremental $10 billion investment in OpenAI served to fire additional interest in AI and its applications.

How is Nvidia benefiting from the AI explosion that is beginning to take shape? The GPT-3 version that was used in ChatGPT late last year was powered by 20,000 graphic processors from Nvidia, Bloomberg reported, citing data from SimilarWeb. OpenAI has since then launched GPT-4, the next iteration of its large-language model.

AMD's shares, meanwhile, have fallen way behind Nvidia since the start of the year as the chipmaker lacked the AI-boost to push its stock higher. This is despite the Lisa Su-led company making a remarkable comeback since its Ryzen line of processors launched in 2017. AMD has been slowly and steadily chipping away into Intel, Inc.'s (NASDAQ: INTC) share of the CPU market since then.

AMD shares have gained over 83% in the past year. The underperformance relative to Nvidia can squarely be blamed on the former being late to the AI party. Realizing the potential, AMD has announced two AI chips, the M1300A and M1300X, which are seen as a potent rival to Nvidia's H100 high-performance GPU processor. AMD expects to ramp up production and start shipments of its AI chips later this year.

NVDA Or AMD: Which Offers Better Returns?

With Nvidia clearly outperforming AMD over one year, it is a no-brainer that a hypothetical $1,000 invested in the former would have fetched a higher return than a similar sum invested in the latter.

The initial investment of $1,000 would have nearly quadrupled with Nvidia and would be worth $3,751.3 now. AMD would have returned a more modest $1,830.42 on a $1,000 initial investment.

DO NVDA And AMD Often Move Together

Linear regression analysis, which gives the correlation between two variables - in this case, the stock performances of Nvidia and AMD, throws up a coefficient of determination of 0.85. The number suggests a fairly positive correlation between the stocks. This implies the variance in the stock performance is less of a directional move and has more to do with the degree of upside.