Nvidia’s Jensen Huang is beginning to learn the meaning of the expression, “The higher they rise, the harder the fall.”
After briefly eclipsing Microsoft and Apple in value last week—and indeed entire European stock markets—the company behind the AI chip boom has experienced the single fastest drawdown in history.
Over the past three days, roughly $430 billion in Nvidia’s market cap has been wiped out, which is the biggest three-day value loss for any company in history. If you measure the drop from its intraday peak on Thursday, more than half-a-trillion dollars have gone up in smoke. That’s almost the entire value of Tesla knocked off its shares, which pose larger problems for the overall stock market.
“If Nvidia corrects pretty hard in the coming months, it becomes very difficult for the [S&P 500] to keep rising,” Barry Bannister, chief equity strategist at Stifel Financial, told the Financial Times.
It hasn’t helped either that the founder and CEO has inadvertently added to the pressure by cashing out himself. Huang’s Rule 10b5-1 trading plan, which automatically executes sales when certain conditions are met, liquidated 720,000 shares worth nearly $95 million this month alone.
The timing is unfortunate coming just before Wednesday’s annual shareholder meeting and two weeks after a 10-for-1 stock split that made it easier for retail investors to buy into the company. One indication many amateur traders might be taking profits in Nvidia is a sudden slump in Bitcoin, an asset highly correlated to the retail market since it is largely untouched by institutional investors.
Speaking with Yahoo Finance, Harvest Portfolio Management co-CIO Paul Meeks blamed the drop on profit taking and talk of AI data center spending peaking.
“The key here is to make investors feel comfortable that there is a long runway yet,” he told the program on Monday.
First @NVIDIA DGX H200 in the world, hand-delivered to OpenAI and dedicated by Jensen "to advance AI, computing, and humanity": pic.twitter.com/rEJu7OTNGT
— Greg Brockman (@gdb) April 24, 2024
While Meeks argued Nvidia still looked cheap compared with Cisco when it surged during the dotcom era on the back of internet infrastructure spending, Nvidia’s stock chart suggested further pressure until the price settled around a support line like the 50-day moving average.
“So [I’m] comfortable with the fundamentals, not comfortable with the technicals,” he said, adding that once the heavy selling volumes begin petering out, he’s “inclined to go back in” and add to his large position in the share.
The company has not responded to a request by Fortune for comment.
Undisputed leader with Elon Musk and OpenAI as key customers
Nvidia’s bleeding-edge H100 chips are specially designed for data centers that train neural networks, including the large language models like GPT-4 and other forms of generative AI. One of its most prolific buyers is Elon Musk, who is ordering more chips than he claims his company Tesla can even install just to ensure he gets his hands on them faster than any of his tech competitors.
Its best-known customer, however, remains OpenAI, whose ChatGPT creation in November 2022 launched the GenAI gold rush. In April Huang took the rare step of hand delivering a personally signed DGX server to the company, one that came equipped with the first H200 training chips offering nearly twice the GPU memory of its predecessor.
Nvidia’s position as the undisputed global leader—whose AI training chips are a matter of U.S. national security—has spawned a rally in its stock price that can only be compared with Tesla’s 2020 pile-on.
On Monday, Deutsche Bank illustrated the historic nature of Nvidia’s surge by publishing a chart that compared its market cap to Warren Buffett’s investment holding. “Berkshire Hathaway has taken over a century to go from zero to just under $1 trillion,” it wrote. “It took 30 days for Nvidia to go from $2 trillion to a $3 trillion market cap.”
Part of this insane volatility stems from the challenge of properly valuing the trajectory of future revenue, earnings, and cash flow when the company’s fundamentals are all improving at a speed no one had anticipated, Nvidia included.
For now, the share is expected to see a rebound when trading on Tuesday opens, but more short-term pain could in store for Nvidia bulls as Meeks suggested. Another adage well known on Wall Street is, “The trend is your friend.”