Jim Cramer, host of Mad Money, said on Monday that stocks tied to artificial intelligence and data-center spending, which had moved almost in lockstep for years, have suddenly begun drifting apart.
“For the past few years, virtually every stock connected to AI and the data center has been joined at the hip, and they’ve steadily marched higher together, but last month, that changed. Over the past two weeks, it’s become very obvious that Google’s Gemini 3 is now the best of the chatbots, surpassing OpenAI’s ChatGPT.”
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Cramer said the change hit what he called the “OpenAI complex,” a group including NVIDIA, Oracle, AMD, Microsoft, CoreWeave, and SoftBank. He pointed out that the group used to trade similarly to what he referred to as the “Google complex,” but the two groups have now split. He mentioned that the OpenAI-linked names were all negative, falling an average of 23%, while Google-connected names fared better.
“At the same time, we’re starting to see another parallel contingent of haves and have-nots. This one’s the hyperscalers that have good balance sheets and hyperscalers that have not good balance sheets.”
Cramer noted that the hyperscalers have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on data-center buildouts. He mentioned Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Oracle, along with private companies such as OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI as examples of companies that have poured enormous sums into the buildout cycle.
“So here’s the bottom line: Last month, the AI data center stocks finally started trading independently. The Google complex cohort roared while the OpenAI complex got hammered. Meanwhile, the hyperscalers with great balance sheets held up much better than the ones with strained balance sheets. Just keep in mind that things change very fast in the AI space, so what was true last month might not necessarily stay true this month or next year. That said, it’s hard to go wrong betting on the companies with superior balance sheets. As for ChatGPT versus Gemini versus everyone else, that can change in a heartbeat.”
Our Methodology
For this article, we compiled a list of 9 stocks that were discussed by Jim Cramer during the episode of Mad Money aired on December 1. We listed the stocks in the order that Cramer mentioned them. We also provided hedge fund sentiment for each stock as of the third quarter of 2025, which was taken from Insider Monkey’s database of 978 hedge funds.
Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 427.7% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 264 percentage points (see more details here).
Jim Cramer Recently Discussed These 9 Stocks
9. Burlington Stores, Inc. (NYSE:BURL)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 44
Burlington Stores, Inc. (NYSE:BURL) is one of the stocks Jim Cramer recently discussed. Cramer mentioned the company while discussing the performance of retailers, as he commented:
“I can tell you that credit quality actually is surprisingly good, or I could go company by company, which is really my specialty. Right now, I find that other than Burlington Stores, every single retailer that’s reported is doing better than expected. In some cases, much better than Kohl’s. The resurgence of the department store, with Macy’s about to report excellent numbers on top of Kohl’s… The sizeable gains in share price for Best Buy was more than just noteworthy. The strength in the dollar stores is insane when you consider how badly they’ve been hit by tariffs. Same goes for Williams-Sonoma, Wayfair, and most notably Gap, which shot the lights out.”
Burlington Stores, Inc. (NYSE:BURL) provides merchandise across apparel, footwear, accessories, home goods, toys, gifts, and baby and beauty products.
8. Waters Corporation (NYSE:WAT)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 42
Waters Corporation (NYSE:WAT) is one of the stocks Jim Cramer recently discussed. Cramer discussed the company’s upcoming merger with Becton, Dickinson’s biosciences and diagnostics business. He remarked:
“Finally, please don’t forget about one that was always my personal favorite, never owned it for the trust, Waters Corporation, one of the quieter companies in this space that specializes in liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry. Now, that’s stuff that you need to be able to do all this life science things. For much of the past few years, Waters was holding up much better than the rest of the industry. But the stock got hit real hard earlier this year, in part because the company announced a complex deal to merge with Becton, Dickinson’s biosciences and diagnostics business back in July.
The market didn’t like the deal initially, and Waters saw its stock plunge. It was so hard to understand. Things then turned around, though. Now, the stock’s up about 45% from its August lows. Now, some of that’s because Waters arguably reported the best quarter in the group about a month ago, revenue up 8% on a constant currency basis, along with a healthy earnings beat. Management also gave a nice boost to their full-year forecast. Now, Waters is still tricky because of that Becton, Dickinson biosciences deal. It’s expected to close in the first quarter of next year, but once that happens, I think it’s going to be a much, much bigger player and really I think it should be loved on Wall Street.”
Waters Corporation (NYSE:WAT) provides liquid chromatography, mass spectrometry, thermal analysis, rheometry, and calorimetry systems. The company’s technologies are used for research, product development, quality checks, and specialized testing.
