Nvidia Corp. slumped Tuesday after reports that Meta Platforms Inc. is in discussions to buy artificial-intelligence chips from Alphabet Inc., a development that sharpened investor anxiety over the durability of Nvidia’s dominance in the data-center AI market.
Shares of the world’s most valuable chipmaker fell 6.6%, erasing about $294 billion in market value — one of the biggest single-day losses for a U.S. company, according to Dow Jones Market Data. Alphabet gained 2.9%, putting the stock within reach of an all-time high.
The moves followed reports that Meta is considering deploying Google’s tensor processing units, or TPUs, in its data centers by 2027. The in-house Google chips are designed to train and run AI models at lower cost and with less energy than Nvidia’s flagship graphics processors, potentially giving large cloud providers and consumer-internet platforms another lever as they weigh soaring AI-infrastructure bills.
The prospect of a major customer exploring alternatives was enough to rattle broader semiconductor names. Advanced Micro Devices dropped 8.4%, while Broadcom slipped 0.3%.
Still, some on Wall Street framed the selloff as an opening. Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon said the pullback has made valuations for Nvidia and Broadcom more compelling, arguing that the long-term demand trajectory for AI compute remains intact even as competitive narratives shift.
The Meta–Google talks underscore a growing reality for investors: Nvidia’s grip on the AI hardware stack is formidable, but its biggest customers are increasingly motivated to diversify.