Stanley Druckenmiller at CNBC’s Delivering Alpha on Sept. 28, 2022.
Scott Mlyn | CNBC
Billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller said on Wednesday that his decision to sell out of Nvidia this year was a “big mistake.”
“I’ve made so many mistakes in my investment career — one of them was I sold all my Nvidia probably somewhere between $800 and $950,” Druckenmiller said in an interview on Bloomberg. “I own none and I owned none the last 400 points.”
Druckenmiller’s comments do not reflect Nvidia’s 10-for-1 stock split, which went into effect in June. The stock closed Wednesday at $135.72. On a split-adjusted basis, his sales would have taken place at between $80 and $95.
Nvidia has been the primary beneficiary of the artificial intelligence boom, selling its graphics processing units, or GPUs, to top cloud companies and the biggest developers of large language models. The stock soared 239% last year and is up another 174% in 2024, closing at a fresh record on Monday.
Earlier this year, Druckenmiller revealed on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that he cut his Duquesne Family Office’s position in Nvidia in late March, saying “we’ve had a hell of a run.”
Taking the split into account, Duquesne owned about 6.18 million shares at the start of the year, 1.76 million at the end of the first quarter and 214,000 when the second quarter closed. In the third quarter of last year, Nvidia was his top holding. At the time, he owned 8.75 million shares worth around $400 million.
If he held onto that entire stake, it would currently be worth about $1.19 billion. Duquesne has not released its third-quarter holdings yet.
“It tripled in a year, and I thought the valuation was rich,” Druckenmiller told Bloomberg. “Nvidia is a wonderful company and were the price to come down, we’d get involved again. But right now, I’m licking my wounds from a bad sale.”
Nvidia is expected to release quarterly results in November, but most of its top customers, including Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet, will report financials later this month.
Druckenmiller told CNBC in May that Nvidia was “a little overhyped now, but underhyped long term.” He added that he was introduced to Nvidia in 2022, when “I didn’t even know how to spell it.”
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, is seen on stage next to a small robot during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, on June 11, 2025.
Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
Nvidia announced Monday that its latest robotics chip module, the Jetson AGX Thor, is now on sale for $3,499 as a developer kit.
The company calls the chip a “robot brain.” The first kits ship next month, Nvidia said last week, and the chips will allow customers to create robots.
After a company uses the developer kit to prototype their robot, Nvidia will sell Thor T5000 modules that can be installed in production-ready robots. If a company needs more than 1,000 Thor chips, Nvidia will charge $2,999 per module.
CEO Jensen Huang has said robotics is the company’s largest growth opportunity outside of artificial intelligence, which has led to the Nvidia’s overall sales more than tripling in the past two years.
“We do not build robots, we do not build cars, but we enable the whole industry with our infrastructure computers and the associated software,” said Deepu Talla, Nvidia’s vice president of robotics and edge AI, on a call with reporters Friday.
The Jetson Thor chips are based on a Blackwell graphics processor, which is Nvidia’s current generation of technology used in its AI chips, as well as its chips for computer games.
Nvidia said that its Jetson Thor chips are 7.5 times faster than its previous generation. That allows them to run generative AI models, including large language models and visual models that can interpret the world around them, which is essential for humanoid robots, Nvidia said. The Jetson Thor chips are equipped with 128GB of memory, which is essential for big AI models.
Companies including Agility Robotics, Amazon, Meta and Boston Dynamics are using its Jetson chips, Nvidia said. Nvidia has also invested in robotics companies such as Field AI.
However, robotics remains a small business for Nvidia, accounting for about 1% of the company’s total revenue, despite the fact that it has launched several new robot chips since 2014. But it’s growing fast.
Nvidia recently combined its business units to group its automotive and robotics divisions into the same line item. That unit reported $567 million in quarterly sales in May, which represented a 72% increase on an annual basis.
The company said its Jetson Thor chips can be used for self-driving cars as well, especially from Chinese brands. Nvidia calls its car chips Drive AGX, and while they are similar to its robotics chips, they run an operating system called Drive OS that’s been tuned for automotive purposes.
Intel’s CEO Lip-Bu Tan speaks at the company’s Annual Manufacturing Technology Conference in San Jose, California, U.S. April 29, 2025.
Laure Andrillon | Reuters
Intel on Monday warned of “adverse reactions” from investors, employees and others to the Trump administration taking a 10% stake in the company, in a filing citing risks involved with the deal.
A key concern area is international sales, with 76% of Intel’s revenue in its last fiscal year coming from outside the U.S., according to the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company had $53.1 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2024, down 2% from the year prior.
For Intel’s international customers, the company is now directly tied to President Donald Trump‘s ever-shifting tariff and trade policies.
“There could be adverse reactions, immediately or over time, from investors, employees, customers, suppliers, other business or commercial partners, foreign governments or competitors,” the company wrote in the filing. “There may also be litigation related to the transaction or otherwise and increased public or political scrutiny with respect to the Company.”
Intel also said that the potential for a changing political landscape in Washington could challenge or void the deal and create risks to current and future shareholders.
The deal, which was announced Friday, gives the Department of Commerce up to 433.3 million shares of the company, which is dilutive to existing shareholders. The purchase of shares is being funded largely by money already awarded to Intel under President Joe Biden‘s CHIPS Act.
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Intel has already received $2.2 billion from the program and is set for another $5.7 billion. A separate federal program awarded $3.2 billion, for a total of $11.1 billion, according to a release.
Trump called the agreement “a great Deal for America” and said the building of advanced chips “is fundamental to the future of our Nation.”
Shares of Intel rallied as momentum built toward a deal in August, with the stock up about 25%.
The agreement requires the government to vote with Intel’s board of directors. In the Monday filing, the company noted that the government stake “reduces the voting and other governance rights of stockholders and may limit potential future transactions that may be beneficial to stockholders.”
Furthermore, the company acknowledged in the filing that it has not completed an analysis of all “financial, tax and accounting implications.”
Intel’s tumultuous fiscal year 2024 included the exit of CEO Pat Gelsinger in December after a four-year tenure during which the stock price tanked and the company lost ground to rivals in the artificial intelligence boom.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends the “Winning the AI Race” Summit in Washington D.C., U.S., July 23, 2025.
Kent Nishimura | Reuters
It’s been two years since the explosion of generative artificial intelligence started to transform Nvidia’s business. Since then, the chipmaker’s revenue has more than tripled and profits have quadrupled.
Nvidia‘s fiscal second-quarter earnings report, scheduled for Wednesday, will mark the second anniversary of growth, as the company shifted from being known as a maker of gaming chips to its current position at the heart of the technology industry.
Last month, Nvidia became the first company to hit a $4 trillion market cap, and it’s continued to appreciate in value. Since the end of 2022, around the time OpenAI launched ChatGPT and sparked the generative AI boom, Nvidia’s stock price is up twelvefold. It’s up 33% this year, closing on Friday at $177.99.
Growth is still substantial for a company Nvidia’s size, but it has slowed dramatically. After five straight quarters of triple-digit expansion in 2023 and 2024, revenue growth dipped to 69% in the fiscal first quarter this year. Nvidia is expected to report a year-over-year jump of 53% to $45.9 billion in its second-quarter report, according to LSEG’s consensus of analyst estimates.
Data center revenue in the first quarter accounted for 88% of Nvidia’s total sales, the clearest sign of how significant AI has become to its business. The company said that 34% of total sales last year came from three unnamed customers. Analysts say Nvidia’s top end users are major internet companies and cloud providers such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta.
“The assumptions and performance of Nvidia really dictates what the market is going to start to price into the AI trade, and that whole AI trade has essentially been driving the market this past year,” said Melissa Otto, head of Visible Alpha Research at S&P Global, which aggregates Wall Street research.
Nvidia makes up about 7.5% of the S&P 500.
Tech’s megacap companies, other than Nvidia, reported quarterly results in late July, updating Wall Street on their investment plans. In all, they’re looking to spend roughly $320 billion on AI technology and data center buildouts this year.
OpenAI, which is still private but has a valuation in the hundreds of billions of dollars, says it will team up with SoftBank and Oracle to spend $500 billion over the next four years on the Stargate project, which President Donald Trump announced in January.
Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, displays the new Blackwell GPU chip during the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California, on March 18, 2024.
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Analysts say about half of AI capital spending ends up with Nvidia. The company’s reliance on the so-called hyperscalers leaves it vulnerable to changes in the macroeconomic environment and in the artificial intelligence industry, which remains hard to predict.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said last week that he believes “investors as a whole are overexcited about AI,” and even said it could be a “bubble.”
But don’t expect a pullback yet. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC on Wednesday that the company “constantly” doesn’t have enough computing power.
As always, Wall Street will be paying close attention to Nvidia’s guidance and other forward-looking commentary from CEO Jensen Huang. For the fiscal third quarter, analysts are expecting revenue growth of 50% to $52.7 billion, according to LSEG. If Nvidia guides higher and tops estimates for the second quarter, analysts say that kind of “beat and raise” could drive AI optimism even higher.
Blackwell ramp
The most important offering from Nvidia is its Blackwell line, which includes individual graphics processing units and entire systems tying together 72 GPUs.
Strong Blackwell numbers would affirm Nvidia’s continuing technological lead and foothold among its key customers, said Ryuta Makino, an analyst at Gamco Investors, which has a stake in the company.
“It solidifies that hyperscaler spending is still very strong with the Blackwell ramp,” Makino said.
Nvidia said in May that its new product line reached $27 billion in sales, accounting for about 70% of data center revenue. That’s a steep increase from $11 billion in the prior quarter.
As more Blackwell chips get installed, experts anticipate that their superior computing power will enable companies like OpenAI and Anthropic to create even more capable AI models. OpenAI’s GPT-5, which was announced earlier this month, was trained on Nvidia’s last-generation Hopper chips, not the newer Blackwell processors.
Nvidia said last year that Blackwell would be limited by supply — how many chips its partners can build and ship — and not by demand.
Blackwell Ultra is expected to start shipping in the second half of 2025. Nvidia recently pushed back on an analyst report from Asia that said Rubin, the chip technology expected to comprise the bulk of GPU sales in 2027, was seeing early production problems.
One visible sign of Nvidia’s rise is Huang’s worldwide fame. He’s regularly name-checked by Trump and during the quarter traveled to meet with business leaders and officials in Taiwan, China, Germany, England and Saudi Arabia.
Huang recently struck a deal with Trump to regain access to the Chinese market. Nvidia will pay 15% of its China chip revenue to the U.S. government in exchange for licenses to export its China-focused AI chip called the H20, Trump said this month. The president added that he’d asked for 20%, but Huang bargained him down.
The H20 is worth a lot to Nvidia. The chip would have contributed about $8 billion in sales in the second quarter, Nvidia said in May, before the U.S. government said it would require a license to ship it to China, effectively shutting off sales.
Nvidia did not include any H20 sales in its guidance for the second quarter, and analysts doubt that it will include any in its forecast for the current period, partially because the Chinese government is pressuring its cloud providers to use homegrown chips from companies such as Huawei.
If H20 is included in guidance, it could boost revenue expectations by about $2 billion to $3 billion, according to analysts at KeyBanc, who recommend buying the stock. But they said they expect Nvidia to completely exclude it, following Advanced Micro Devices’ lead from early August.
“Additionally, given a potential 15% tax on AI exports and pressure from the China government for its AI providers to use domestic AI chips, we expect management to guide conservatively,” the KeyBanc analysts wrote.
Nvidia is working on a new China AI chip based on Blackwell that would also likely need the president’s approval.
“I’m sure he’s pitching the president all the time,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said about Huang last week on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.”