Nvidia mostly sat out the chip sector's best quarter ever. What needs to change?

Semiconductor stocks are about to complete their best quarter ever. And yet, the biggest chipmaker of them all — Nvidia — has largely sat out the rally. To reignite its stock, Jim Cramer said Nvidia needs to open its checkbook and return more cash to investors. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index , known as the SOX, has soared more than 80% in the second quarter, as demand for artificial intelligence computing strengthened and broadened. The SOX leaderboard for the quarter is dotted with blistering gains: Micron is up 239% through Monday's close, fueled by soaring prices for memory and storage chips thanks to a major supply crunch. Lam Research , which makes essential equipment used in the semiconductor manufacturing process, is up 92%. Club name Intel has nearly tripled, and Advanced Micro Devices has ripped more than 165%. Both companies are longtime makers of central processing units (CPUs) for data centers. The first wave of the AI compute boom was driven by accelerator chips, most notably Nvidia's graphics processing units (GPUs). The second quarter, however, marked Wall Street's full recognition that an emerging type of AI computing — agentic systems capable of completing tasks autonomously — requires a ton of CPU power to go along with the GPUs. This also helped a fellow Club name, Arm Holdings , which is pushing deeper into the CPU market, climb by over 125% during that period. …