NEW YORK, March 23, 2026, 09:21 EDT
Nvidia shares climbed roughly 2.8% to $177.48 ahead of the bell at 9:00 a.m. EDT on Monday. The gain came after President Donald Trump announced a delay in planned strikes on Iranian power plants—a decision that pushed oil prices down hard and allowed beaten-down growth stocks like Nvidia to recover some ground.
Relief followed a bruising Friday session. Nvidia dropped 3.3%, closing at $172.70, as Wall Street recoiled on worries that rising oil prices could fan inflation and force interest rates to stay elevated—pressure that tends to hit high-multiple tech stocks like Nvidia before others.
Nvidia remains the yardstick for gauging the AI trade. Before its February earnings, options traders tagged the stock as a top market mover for the week, despite the fact that anticipated post-earnings volatility had dropped to its lowest point in three years.
Investors are still digesting last week’s GTC conference. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang put the company’s potential market for Blackwell and Rubin chips at more than $1 trillion through 2027. Even with that, the stock gave back its initial pop.
The company flagged new demand on the horizon. On Thursday, Reuters reported that Amazon Web Services plans to purchase 1 million Nvidia GPUs by 2027. Nvidia’s vice president for hyperscale and high-performance computing, Ian Buck, summed up the challenge: “Inference is hard. It’s wickedly hard,” he said, describing the moment when AI shifts from training on data to producing answers for users. Reuters
Nvidia is resuming production of its H200 chip for China after obtaining export licenses and fresh demand. “Our supply chain is getting fired up,” CEO Huang said, marking a restart for a product line paused last year. Reuters
But the same question keeps dogging the stock: how long can Nvidia keep its lead as customers ramp up efforts to design their own chips. Jacob Bourne at eMarketer, ahead of GTC, figured Nvidia would push further into inference, networking, and AI data-center infrastructure. Summit Insights analyst KinNgai Chan put it more bluntly—“Nvidia is definitely going to see more competition compared to a year ago”—with more cloud providers scaling up custom AI chips for specialized work. Intel and AMD are on that list of contenders ready to capitalize. Reuters
There’s a chance Monday’s rally is nothing more than a macro-driven relief move. Fiona Cincotta at City Index called Trump’s pause “exactly what the market needed to hear” for investors to dial back worst-case fears, though she cautioned the bounce hinges on further positive signals from Iran. If that optimism evaporates, Nvidia may well be pulled right back into the oil-and-rates narrative. With a market cap near $4.53 trillion, the stock’s just too big to sidestep. Reuters
