Nvidia’s stock is sliding, and not even a tariff exemption could stop the bleed. The chip giant dropped nearly 6% in premarket trading Thursday, reflecting broader investor anxiety after President Trump’s sweeping new import tariffs rattled global markets.
Nvidia, a leader in AI chips, technically escaped direct tariffs, for now. While Trump’s new trade package includes a hefty 32% tariff on goods from Taiwan, where Nvidia chips are made, the White House clarified in a post-announcement fact sheet that semiconductors won’t be part of that specific levy. Instead, chip tariffs are being deferred and will be addressed separately, according to a senior administration official.
But Wall Street isn’t breathing easy. Analysts point to two major concerns: lack of clarity and potential retaliation from China.
As UBS analyst Timothy Arcuri put it, “This was supposed to be a clearing event. It wasn’t. If anything, ambiguity is still high.”
Markets hate uncertainty, and the chip sector is ground zero right now. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Broadcom (AVGO) both followed Nvidia’s downward spiral, falling 5.6% and 7.6% respectively. Even though Nvidia dodged the bullet for now, the looming threat of export restrictions, especially Biden-era “AI Diffusion” rules set to take effect on May 15, keeps investors on edge.
To make matters worse, the possibility of Beijing retaliating to Trump’s 54% total duties on Chinese goods has intensified market jitters. China is both a key market and manufacturing hub for many tech players, and any escalation could hit chipmakers’ global supply chains hard.
Meanwhile, Nvidia did have good news. The company announced that its Blackwell platform broke performance records in AI inference benchmarks by MLCommons, showing up to 30x gains over previous systems. Inference, the AI process of generating outputs from trained models, now represents roughly 40% of Nvidia’s data-center revenue, and it’s growing.
Still, the performance breakthrough wasn’t enough to counter the macro-level fears gripping the market.
Bottom line: Nvidia may have dodged the tariff, for now, but it’s still caught in the crossfire of global trade tensions, regulatory ambiguity, and investor uncertainty.
