The Real SpaceX Play: 5 Chip Stocks Powering the IPO Before It Launches

Key Points

• Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing is the quiet winner of the SpaceX IPO story, manufacturing chips for every major AI player regardless of who designs them.
• Intel is experiencing a business resurgence driven by surging CPU demand as agentic AI shifts the GPU-to-CPU ratio from 8-to-1 toward parity.
• Amkor Technology, a semiconductor packaging company, is emerging as an overlooked bottleneck play as chip assembly complexity rises and TSMC expands U.S. manufacturing capacity.

A $2 trillion IPO doesn't happen in a vacuum. Before SpaceX ever trades on a public exchange, the infrastructure powering its reusable rockets and AI-driven systems is already running through a handful of publicly traded companies—and according to Dylan Jovine, founder of Behind the Markets, most investors are focused on the wrong part of the story.

"SpaceX is not happening without the power of chips," Jovine says. The company's ability to land reusable rockets autonomously and scale Starlink's satellite internet business runs on semiconductor technology, designed, manufactured, packaged, and shipped by companies you can buy today.

Here are the five stocks Jovine believes are positioned to benefit most.

Taiwan Semiconductor: The Chip Maker Behind Every Name on This List

No matter who designs the next great AI chip—NVIDIA NASDAQ: NVDA, Advanced Micro Devices NASDAQ: AMD, Intel NASDAQ: INTC, or Elon Musk's own AI5—Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing NYSE: TSM is almost certainly the one turning that design into silicon.

Jovine describes TSM as the manufacturing backbone of the entire AI chip ecosystem, a position its most recent earnings report only reinforces.

"TSMC wins no matter who creates chips," he says. "They win here, they win there, they're winning everywhere."

The company holds a dominant position in advanced semiconductor fabrication that rivals, and by some measures exceeds, SpaceX's dominance in orbital launches.

That moat compounds as chip complexity increases: as AI5, next-gen GPU architectures, and agentic AI processors require ever-more-sophisticated manufacturing, TSMC's process leadership becomes harder, not easier, to replicate.

Intel: The CPU Story the Market Is Just Starting to Price In

The shift toward agentic AI—systems that can act on your behalf, not just answer questions—is quietly rewiring chip demand.

In the early days of the AI buildout, the ratio of GPUs to CPUs sold ran roughly 8-to-1. Jovine says that ratio has already compressed to 4-to-1, and Intel's own CEO has suggested the industry could approach parity.

That's a seismic demand shift for Intel, a company whose core strength has always been CPU architecture. "Intel's like the Empire Strikes Back," Jovine says.

The stock has reflected that rerating, up over 100% the past month, but Jovine argues the underlying thesis is structural, not speculative. The Magnificent Seven alone are projected to spend close to $200 billion collectively on AI infrastructure, and agentic workloads require CPUs at a scale the industry wasn't built to supply.

That mismatch between demand and production capacity is exactly the kind of bottleneck that produces pricing power.

For investors worried about chasing a stock that's already run, Jovine offers a measured take: short-term consolidation is normal and healthy. The longer-term wave, he argues, is still building.

AMD: Riding Both Sides of the AI Wave

AMD benefits from the same CPU demand surge lifting Intel, and adds GPU exposure on top of it.

The stock climbed roughly 70% the past month, driven by the same enterprise AI spending cycle.

Microsoft recently noted that 90% of Fortune 500 companies are actively exploring agentic AI tools, and AMD is part of that infrastructure stack.

The setup here is straightforward: as corporate clients push cloud providers to agentify their operations, the demand signal flows down the chain to chip designers. AMD sits squarely in that path.

NVIDIA: Cheap by a Different Measure

It might be the last word most investors associate with NVIDIA, but Jovine uses it: cheap. At least relatively speaking.

While Intel and AMD have seen sharp near-term moves on the CPU narrative, NVIDIA has been consolidating—waiting, as Jovine frames it, for the next chapter of its own story.

The GPU narrative that drove NVIDIA's initial surge has plateaued, but the agentic AI wave promises a new demand cycle for high-performance compute.

One research firm Jovine references put a $24 trillion valuation on NVIDIA, a figure it acknowledged would draw skepticism, but that it defended on the basis of the company's unmatched GPU pricing power and market position.

The Mag 7's collective AI CapEx commitments make this less of a prediction than a demand accounting exercise. That spending has to land somewhere.

Amkor Technology: The Overlooked Link in the Chain

The least familiar name on the list may carry some of the most interesting setups.

Amkor Technology NASDAQ: AMKR is a semiconductor packaging company, and until recently, that was a low-margin commodity business.

That's changing. As chip designs have grown more complex, TSMC and other manufacturers are delivering chips as "chiplets," modular components that must be assembled before they're functional.

Packaging companies like Amkor now perform sophisticated assembly work that requires advanced equipment and precision at scales invisible to the naked eye. The value they add has increased; so has their leverage in the supply chain.

Jovine points to one telling detail: when TSMC built its major new fabrication facility in Arizona, Amkor constructed its own facility seven miles away. The proximity is strategic, and the implication is clear. AMKR's fortunes are increasingly tied to TSMC's output volumes.

The stock had a recent run of 65% before pulling back modestly in late April. Jovine frames the consolidation as a normal technical reset after a sharp rerating, not a sign the thesis has shifted.

AI Spending Keeps the Wave Going

SpaceX is the story everyone's watching. But the companies making it possible are already public. From chip design to fabrication to assembly, the infrastructure behind the most anticipated IPO in history runs through this list, and the Mag 7's commitment to spending at historic scale keeps the demand signal strong well beyond any single launch.

The wave doesn't stop until the spending does.