New York, Feb 17, 2026, 4:42 PM EST — After-hours
- Nvidia shares rose in late trading after it disclosed a multiyear chip supply agreement with Meta.
- Investors are watching whether Big Tech’s AI buildout keeps translating into orders ahead of Nvidia’s Feb. 25 results.
Nvidia shares were up about 1.2% in after-hours trading on Tuesday, while Meta Platforms was little changed and other AI-linked megacaps were mixed.
The move came as Wall Street settled back in after a long weekend and as the market keeps testing whether heavy spending on data centers will deliver returns fast enough to match big valuations. (New York Stock Exchange)
Nvidia said it signed a multiyear deal to sell Meta “millions” of its current and future artificial intelligence chips, including its Blackwell systems and its next Rubin chips, and also its Grace and Vera central processing units. “It … makes it an excellent data center-only CPU,” Ian Buck, a Nvidia general manager, said of the company’s server processors. (Reuters)
The chips in question are the plumbing behind generative AI. GPUs (graphics processing units) handle the heavy lifting for training models, while CPUs (central processing units) run a lot of the surrounding work in a data center, from feeding data to handling database tasks.
Nvidia has been trying to broaden its pitch beyond GPUs, pushing CPUs as a way to win more of the server bill — and to stay close to customers as workloads shift toward “inference,” the day-to-day running of AI systems.
Meta, for its part, has been developing its own AI chips and has discussed using Google’s in-house TPUs, a reminder that Nvidia’s biggest customers are also working on alternatives.
Investors have also been parsing fresh quarterly holdings disclosures for signs of positioning around the AI trade. In a separate SEC filing story, hedge fund Adage Capital trimmed stakes in several AI heavyweights, while SoftBank reported it had dissolved its Nvidia stake. (Reuters)
The risk for Nvidia is that today’s deal headlines do not change the bigger debate: whether Big Tech slows its spending pace, leans harder on custom chips, or squeezes suppliers as competition from rivals in servers and accelerators grows.
Traders’ next hard marker is Nvidia’s quarterly report on Feb. 25, when the focus will be on supply, pricing and how quickly Blackwell ramps — and whether management signals that customer demand is holding up into the next quarter.
