Nvidia Stock Rises. It's Shrugging Off Worries Over Tariffs and Rival Chips

Dow Jones
11 Apr

Nvidia stock was rising on Friday. The market reaction to tariffs continues to be the main driver for the chip maker but its customers are also upgrading their in-house hardware.

Nvidia shares were up 1.2% at $108.84 in morning trading. The stock fell 5.9% during Thursday's session.

Nvidia continues to be driven by wider market sentiment around tariffs. The stock rose 19% on Wednesday after Trump announced a 90-day delay on the majority of reciprocal tariffs, but subsequently fell as the market digested the escalation of U.S.-Chinese trade tensions.

The total tariffs imposed on China in Trump's second term now add up to 145%, the White House said Thursday. That creates a risk of retaliation against American companies like Nvidia, although so far it hasn't been specifically targeted.

China said Friday that it would increase levies on U.S.-made goods to 125%, but wouldn't match any further increases by the U.S., saying American imports are no longer marketable under current levels.

Citi analyst Atif Malik wrote in a research note on Friday that the macroeconomic certainty was leading the bank to cut its estimates of Nvidia's graphics-processing unit (GPU) sales by 3% this year and in 2026. He reduced his target price on the stock to $15o from $163 but kept a Buy rating.

"We assume Nvidia, given its technology leadership and AI GPU price in-elasticity, will be able to partially pass down the increased GPU cost that may emanate from the trade war," Malik wrote.

Away from tariff drama, some of Nvidia's biggest customers are continuing to signal they will try and lessen their dependence on the chip maker.

"AI does not have to be as expensive as it is today, and it won't be in the future," wrote Amazon CEO Andy Jassy in a shareholder letter on Thursday. "Chips are the biggest culprit. Most AI to date has been built on one chip provider."

Amazon is developing its own answer to Nvidia with a family of custom silicon chips called Amazon Trainium. However, it continues to be a big customer for Nvidia hardware.

Earlier this week, Alphabet's Google said its seventh-generation tensor processing unit (TPU), called Ironwood, will be available to cloud customers in late 2025. Ironwood is designed for inference -- the process of producing answers from AI models -- and is more than 10 times more powerful than its predecessor, Google said.

There has been speculation over whether Nvidia's dominant position in AI chips would weaken as the focus shifts from training AI models to inference. The company has pushed back hard against that, noting inference makes up around 40% of its data-center revenue and is growing fast. It says that its NVL72 server system delivers a fourfold improvement in AI model training but up to a 30 times improvement in inference compared with previous systems.

Google also said Wednesday that its cloud business will be among the first to offer Nvidia's coming Vera Rubin AI chips.

Among other chip makers, Advanced Micro Devices was rising 3% and Broadcom gained 1.1% in morning trading.

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