NEW YORK, February 19, 2026, 4:47 PM EST — After-hours
- NVIDIA Corporation shares slipped 0.04% to $187.90 in Thursday’s regular session and were little changed after the bell
- Investors are positioning ahead of Nvidia’s quarterly results due Feb. 25
- Traders are weighing AI-chip demand signals against valuation nerves and rising “inference” competition
Shares of NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA) were little changed in after-hours trading on Thursday after edging down 0.04% to close at $187.90, as chip stocks cooled with the broader market. Broadcom ended slightly higher while Intel fell. (MarketWatch)
The near-flat close masks what traders are really doing: keeping positions light ahead of Nvidia’s next results, when the company’s outlook tends to set the tone for the AI chip trade.
Why it matters now is simple. Nvidia’s report next week lands in a market that has been jumpy about the price investors are paying for AI growth, and whether the spending boom turns into profits fast enough.
Nvidia’s shares rose 1.6% on Wednesday after the company said it had signed a multi-year deal to sell millions of its current and future AI chips to Meta Platforms. “At a certain point, weakness in tech was bound to bring in the marginal buyer,” Ross Mayfield, an investment strategy analyst at Baird, said. (Reuters)
Thursday’s session went the other way. The S&P 500 ended down 0.28% and the Nasdaq slipped 0.31%, with investors also looking to Friday’s Personal Consumption Expenditures report — the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge. “The market is trying to grapple with what business lines are under threat in a material way from AI,” said Keith Buchanan, a senior portfolio manager at GLOBALT Investments. (Reuters)
Competition chatter also bubbled up. Toronto-based startup Taalas said it raised $169 million and has developed a chip it says can run AI applications faster and more cheaply than conventional approaches. “This hardwiring is partly what gives us the speed,” CEO Ljubisa Bajic told Reuters. (Reuters)
Taalas is pitching a niche in “inference” — the stage where an AI model produces answers to user queries — an area where cost and power draw can matter more than raw training speed. Nvidia dominates the market for training chips, but investors have been watching for cracks as customers push for cheaper ways to run AI at scale.
Still, the immediate market impact is hard to measure. Startups can struggle to manufacture at volume, and Nvidia’s advantage has been its software ecosystem and the way customers buy whole systems, not just chips.
The risk for Nvidia is less about any one rival and more about expectations. A rich valuation leaves little room for a stumble, and any hint of slower demand or margin pressure can hit the stock quickly.
Next up is Friday’s inflation data and then Nvidia’s results on Feb. 25 after the close. Traders will listen for guidance and comments on supply and customer spending, which often move the shares more than the headline numbers. (Wall Street Horizon)
