By Adam Clark
Nvidia looks set to fall sharply following President Donald Trump's imposition of sweeping tariffs on imports to the U.S. The chip maker escaped specific levies but the wider market reaction and fears of Chinese retaliation are set to drag on the shares.
Nvidia shares were down 3.2% at $106.93 in the Thursday premarket having tumbled 5.7% at $104.15 in after-hours trading. The stock rose 0.3% during Wednesday's session.
The tariff announcement wasn't quite as bad as it could have been for Nvidia. Trump said the levy on imports for Taiwan -- where Nvidia's chips are mostly manufactured -- will be set at 32%. However, the White House published a fact sheet after Trump's announcement that said semiconductors would not be subject to that reciprocal tariff.
That doesn't mean chip tariffs are off the table entirely. Products such as semiconductors, pharmaceuticals and lumber will be addressed separately, a senior administration official said.
The other major concern is likely to be potential retaliation from Beijing, with Chinese goods now facing total duties of 54% after the latest tariff announcements.
Among other chip makers, Advanced Micro Devices fell 5.8% in after-hours trading and Broadcom was down 6.3%.
Meanwhile, Nvidia on Wednesday said its Blackwell computing platform set performance records in tests for inferencing -- the process of generating output from AI models -- carried out by MLCommons, an open engineering consortium.
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.
Write to Adam Clark at adam.clark@barrons.com
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April 03, 2025 04:58 ET (08:58 GMT)
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