Nvidia Stock Falls for a Sixth Straight Day as It Becomes the Worst-Performing Chip Stock So Far This Year

Nvidia shares slipped again Monday morning, extending a losing streak that has now stretched to six consecutive trading sessions and left the chipmaker as the worst-performing major name in the entire semiconductor sector this year, even as demand for its artificial intelligence hardware remains historically strong.

Shares of the Santa Clara, California-based company were trading at $190.77 as of 10:19 a.m. EDT, down $1.76, or 0.91%, on the day. The decline pushes Nvidia further from the all-time high of $236.54 it reached on May 14, a level the stock has not approached since, and pulls it closer to the lower end of a key technical support zone that some chart watchers have flagged around $194 to $195. Nvidia's market capitalization, which sat at roughly $4.66 trillion as of last week, has fallen about 5.6% over the past seven days alone.

The pullback stands out because it has come despite, rather than because of, weak underlying business performance. Nvidia is up only about 3.65% year-to-date as of late June, a striking laggard compared with the broader chip sector it helped create. The VanEck Semiconductor exchange-traded fund, which tracks the industry broadly, is up roughly 70% over the same period, while Micron Technology has surged nearly 284% and Advanced Micro Devices has climbed around 138%. The disconnect has turned Nvidia, long considered the bellwether of the artificial intelligence trade, into the sector's weakest performer even as AI infrastructure spending across the industry continues to accelerate.

Much of that dynamic traces back to simple valuation math and investor psychology following Nvidia's most recent earnings report. The company had already climbed roughly 13.7% from its February earnings report through its May 14 peak, meaning a substantial amount of good news was priced in well before the actual first-quarter fiscal 2027 results arrived on May 20. When those results, ultimately a beat, were released, there was limited additional buying left to push the stock higher, a pattern market analysts often describe as "buy the rumor, sell the news."

China has emerged as a more persistent and structural concern weighing on the stock. Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang acknowledged publicly on May 21 that the company has "largely conceded" the market for advanced AI chips in China to domestic rival Huawei, a statement that aligned with the company's own earnings disclosures showing its first-quarter data center revenue from China was effectively zero. The pressure intensified in early June when the U.S. Department of Commerce moved to close a loophole that had allowed Nvidia's Rubin and Blackwell chips to reach Chinese AI companies through offshore subsidiaries. While the move was not as severe as the broader restrictions placed on Nvidia's H20 chips in 2025, analysts at JPMorgan and Bernstein have estimated that the combination of export controls and growing domestic Chinese competition could create a revenue headwind of $5.5 billion to $16 billion over the coming fiscal cycle.

Some market watchers have also pointed to a more granular, real-time indicator of AI demand: the price to rent computing capacity on Nvidia's high-end chips through major cloud platforms. The hourly rental rate for a single B200 graphics processor peaked at $6.11 on May 30 before falling to $4.22 by June 21, a drop of roughly 31% in just three weeks. That rental index, tracked through compute-monitoring dashboards and embedded in prediction-market contracts on platforms such as Kalshi, functions as an informal proxy for how tightly AI computing capacity is being utilized, and its decline has added to questions about whether near-term demand growth is decelerating even as long-term AI infrastructure investment continues.

Nvidia's own guidance, however, suggests the company sees a clear path forward without relying on China at all. The company's second-quarter revenue forecast of $91 billion was issued with the explicit assumption that it includes no data center chip sales to China whatsoever, implying that growth from sovereign AI initiatives, enterprise deployments and global AI cloud infrastructure customers is strong enough on its own to support what would be a new quarterly revenue record.

Wall Street's overall view of the stock remains overwhelmingly positive despite the recent slide. Of 37 analysts currently covering Nvidia, 36 rate the stock a Buy or Strong Buy, with just one Hold rating and zero Sell ratings across the entire analyst community. The consensus 12-month price target sits at roughly $309, implying substantial upside from current levels, even as the stock's recent technical performance has been weak by its own historical standards, having fallen in seven of the past 10 trading days for a cumulative drop of more than 6% over that stretch.

The stock's struggles have also drawn commentary from prominent investors navigating the broader AI trade. Billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller, who has previously acknowledged that selling out of Nvidia earlier in its run was a "big mistake," has more recently been rotating money into other chip names, including a fresh purchase of 196,000 shares of Broadcom, illustrating how some large investors are diversifying their AI exposure across the sector rather than concentrating it in Nvidia alone.

Nvidia has continued to roll out new products and partnerships even as its stock has struggled. The company unveiled a new processor called Vera, designed for AI agent workloads, alongside the Vera BlueField-4 STX platform for AI-driven storage processing and security, and has said its Vera Rubin platform is ramping into full production to power what it describes as agentic AI factories worldwide. Nvidia has also partnered with Microsoft on reimagining Windows PCs for what the companies have called the age of personal AI, and the company continues to expand its presence in quantum computing, an area increasingly seen by some investors as an adjacent long-term growth opportunity beyond its core graphics and data center businesses.

Nvidia's next earnings report is expected in late August, a date that will offer the clearest test yet of whether the company's non-China growth engines can continue to offset the lost Chinese revenue and justify the bullish price targets that remain firmly in place across most of Wall Street, even as the stock itself has spent much of the past several weeks moving in the opposite direction.