New York, March 2, 2026, 06:25 EST — Premarket
- Nvidia shares down about 1.5% in premarket trade, tracking a broad risk-off tone
- Investors weigh Nvidia’s deeper OpenAI ties and a report on a new inference-focused chip ahead of GTC
- Oil’s jump and rate worries set the tone for tech into the week
Nvidia shares fell 1.5% to about $174.56 in U.S. premarket trading on Monday, after finishing Friday at $177.19. 1
The drop lands as investors juggle two competing forces: fresh geopolitical shock that has pushed traders into safety, and a new burst of deal-and-product headlines around the AI buildout that Nvidia dominates. 2
U.S. stock index futures were down more than 1% as crude jumped about 8% after the weekend escalation in the Middle East, a mix that tends to squeeze growth stocks by stoking inflation fears and damping bets on near-term Federal Reserve cuts. Societe Generale analysts warned the market impact could be “more durable” if the conflict drags on. 2
Against that backdrop, Nvidia is also back in the center of the AI financing cycle. OpenAI said on Friday it is raising $110 billion in a funding round that values the ChatGPT maker at $840 billion, with $30 billion from Nvidia, $50 billion from Amazon and $30 billion from SoftBank. 3
The size matters because it signals how much money the biggest AI customers expect to spend on computing — and who they want close when the bills come due. Amazon said OpenAI will use 2 gigawatts of computing capacity powered by Amazon’s Trainium chips, while Microsoft’s existing arrangements with OpenAI remain in place. 3
Nvidia also has a potential product catalyst building into mid-March. The Wall Street Journal reported Nvidia is planning a new processor platform aimed at “inference” — the stage where a trained AI model generates answers — and that it could be unveiled at Nvidia’s GTC developer conference in San Jose. 4
The report said the system would incorporate a chip designed by startup Groq. Reuters has previously reported OpenAI has been unhappy with how quickly some Nvidia hardware can deliver answers for certain tasks and has looked at alternatives. 4
Nvidia, meanwhile, is still coming off its late-February results, where it posted record quarterly revenue and forecast first-quarter revenue of about $78 billion, while flagging it was not assuming any data center compute revenue from China in its outlook. “Computing demand is growing exponentially,” CEO Jensen Huang said in the release. 5
The setup leaves traders with a clear downside scenario: if the geopolitical shock keeps oil elevated and pushes yields higher, richly valued chip stocks can reprice fast. And on the AI side, any sign that hyperscalers and top customers are accelerating custom silicon — or shifting inference workloads away from Nvidia’s gear — would sharpen the debate over how long Nvidia can hold pricing power.
The next Nvidia-specific test is close. Nvidia’s GTC runs March 16–19, with Huang due to deliver a keynote on March 16 — a stage the company often uses to lay out its next hardware roadmap. 6
