After Samsung Electronics' earnings release, AI hardware-related stocks plunged in the U.S. market and money flowed into large-cap tech stocks that had been weak.

On July 7, CNBC reported that Jim Cramer (짐 크레이머) said the market reaction showed the possibility that AI leadership could change.

The starting point was Samsung Electronics' earnings. Samsung Electronics shares fell 7 percent right after the release. Cramer called the results "excellent, but not excellent enough." He said the market in particular began to question demand for memory semiconductors.

Investors interpreted Samsung Electronics' earnings not as a company-specific issue but as a broader signal for AI infrastructure. Stocks directly linked to data center buildouts weakened, and Micron, which competes with Samsung Electronics in the memory market, fell 4.7 percent.

He focused on where money went after the selling. Rather than broad weakness across tech, buying flowed back into large-cap names such as Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Apple and Nvidia. Money also went into enterprise software names such as Salesforce, Adobe and ServiceNow.

Cramer said the session reminded him of a typical trading day on Wall Street in the past. "Today looked like the old days," he said. He pointed to a period when Nvidia chips were seen as the core of computing and Google, Meta and Amazon lifted the market. He also cited Apple as a stock that is not heavily swayed by general-purpose semiconductor prices.

The move also aligns with fatigue over investments in the AI supply chain. Cramer said the market may have started to view itself as having been too concentrated in AI supply-chain trades. In contrast, the view is gaining ground that companies funding data center investments have seen weak share performance for months and have become relatively attractive on valuation.

He said Amazon, Alphabet and Meta "have had a very hard time for most of this year." The remark reflected a perception that while the market chased AI beneficiaries, the big tech companies executing large-scale AI investment were relatively overlooked.

Cramer did not conclude a trend reversal based on a single day's trade. "Today could be the first day of a bigger move, or it could be nothing," he said, adding, "It definitely felt like a change." He said the sharp shift in market leaders in a single day stood out clearly.

The session became a test of whether the AI investment narrative can be re-rated from semiconductors and data center equipment toward large platform and software companies that operate AI services and carry out investment. The market is expected to watch whether concerns over memory demand are a temporary reaction or lead to a broader valuation adjustment across the AI supply chain.