Nvidia leads chipmaker stocks lower as investor fears over AI demand continue to weigh

Nvidia (NVDA) stock fell as much as 2.6% early Thursday, leading other chipmakers down as fears over AI demand continued to weigh on the sector.

The drop puts Nvidia shares down nearly 13% year-to-date, with the AI chipmaking giant seeing its worst monthly performance in February since July 2022.

“It’s been a rough year for NVDA so far…The stock (along with many of its AI-semi peers) has suffered, battered by a storm of growth fears, supply chain noise, and tariff and regulatory risks,” Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon wrote in a note to investors earlier this week.

“Sentiment has clearly pivoted for now on the AI group.”

Industry news late Wednesday and early Thursday did little to quell investor anxieties.

The Financial Times reported Wednesday night that CoreWeave — a private cloud services company prepping to launch a $35 billion IPO — has lost business from Microsoft over delivery issues and missed deadlines. CoreWeave is a large Nvidia customer.

Separately, custom AI chipmaker Marvell Technology (MRVL) — which supplies semiconductors to Amazon and Microsoft — reported quarterly financial results after the bell Wednesday that failed to impress investors looking for an AI payoff. Also on Thursday, Chinese tech giant Alibaba (BABA) unveiled an AI model it said rivals DeepSeek’s R-1, whose introduction spurred market fears over a reduction in AI hardware spending as models become more cost-efficient.

Raymond James analysts said the Marvel’s fourth quarter earnings and guidance were “more modest than we anticipated, which is a surprise given the strong results from peers.”

Marvell shares plunged more than 17% in early trading on Thursday.

Other artificial intelligence chipmakers and AI adjacent stocks also suffered early Thursday.

Custom AI semiconductor maker Broadcom (AVGO) fell 5%, while GPU-maker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) fell 2%. British chip architecture designer Arm (ARM) dropped 4%, Micron (MU) sank 3.5%, and Qualcomm (QCOM) dipped more than 1.4%.

Broadcom and AMD are seen as a rival to Nvidia, while Arm and Micron are partners whose products are used in Nvidia’s server designs. Broadcom is set to report earnings after the bell Thursday.

The declines come as investors size up the hype over artificial intelligence and digest Big Tech’s stated AI investments.

Tech giants Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Amazon are set to spend more than $300 billion in 2025 alone. TSMC and Apple have committed to spending $100 billion and $500 billion, respectively, in new investments in the US over the next several years to expand their US manufacturing footprint for AI chips and servers.