Nvidia shares pulled back below the $200 mark in early Monday trading, giving up recent gains as competitive pressures in the artificial intelligence chip sector showed no signs of easing.
The stock fell 1.5% to $198.51, declining more steeply than major benchmarks.
The S&P 500 was down 0.4%, the Nasdaq Composite shed 0.7%, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average dipped 0.2%.
The move reversed part of a 15% advance recorded over the past month, during which Nvidia had briefly cleared the $200 level — a threshold that has so far proved difficult to sustain.
Google steps up chip ambitions
Alphabet’s Google is reportedly preparing to unveil a new generation of its tensor processing units, or TPUs, at the Google Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas this week.
The launch is expected to include chips built specifically for inference — the computational work involved in deploying trained AI models — a segment that is drawing increasing investment across the semiconductor industry.
Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean said demand for faster AI query processing was reshaping how chips should be designed.
“It now becomes sensible to specialise chips more for training or more for inference workloads,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg, adding that the company is examining “a whole bunch of different things,” including output speed.
Google’s push into this space is underpinned by a decade of in-house chip development, deep capital resources from its search business, and direct experience building and running large AI models.
It is the only major AI developer manufacturing custom silicon at a meaningful scale, enabling close coordination between its hardware and software teams.
Nvidia’s GPUs remain the benchmark for AI model training.
The company has also moved to strengthen its inference offering — last month, it began shipping a chip for faster inference built on technology acquired from Groq through a reported $20 billion licensing deal.
Nvidia stock is underperforming peers
The stock’s recent underperformance relative to other chipmakers has been hard to ignore.
Advanced Micro Devices has gained roughly around 40% over the past month, while Intel has climbed approximately 50% over the same period.
A key overhang for the stock remains uncertainty around artificial intelligence spending.
Large technology companies—often referred to as hyperscalers—have driven demand for Nvidia’s chips through aggressive investment in data centres and infrastructure.
However, investors are increasingly questioning how long this pace can be sustained and when it will translate into meaningful returns.
Major customers, including Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon, continue to spend heavily, but confidence in near-term monetisation has weakened.
Wall Street has not turned cautious on Nvidia despite the short-term noise.
Bernstein last week reiterated a Buy rating with a $300 price target.
Oppenheimer’s Rick Schafer kept an Outperform rating and a $265 target, while holding more neutral views on AMD and Intel.
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