Nvidia faces pressure on Vera, China and stuck shares as AI boom nears $5T mark

28 May 2026

SANTA CLARA, California, May 28, 2026, 14:03 (PDT)

Nvidia’s market value hangs above $5.2 trillion, but the stock is lagging behind this chip surge.
The company is looking to broaden the narrative from GPUs to Vera CPUs, as AI demand moves toward agents and inference.
Bulls like the record revenue and the $200 billion market. Skeptics flag China, supply constraints, and valuation.

Nvidia is underperforming the rest of the chip sector, though its market cap remains above $5 trillion. Investors are now watching to see if the new Vera CPU will pick up the slack for the AI trade after last week’s record results. Shares last traded at $214.25, up 0.8%. Nvidia’s market value is about $5.23 trillion.

Nvidia isn’t the only straightforward AI hardware play now. Barron’s said Thursday Nvidia shares are up about 14% this year, but that trails the PHLX Semiconductor Index, which is up 79% as investors bet on memory suppliers, server makers and custom-chip firms to gain from the AI push.

Nvidia delivered strong first-quarter numbers. Revenue jumped 85% to $81.6 billion, with data-center sales at $75.2 billion. The outlook for the second quarter is $91 billion in revenue, not including any data-center compute sales from China. Nvidia also added $80 billion to its buyback plan and raised its dividend to 25 cents from 1 cent.

Nvidia is pushing Vera, its new central processing unit, into the spotlight — a shift from the graphics chips that built its AI leadership. CEO Jensen Huang told analysts Vera opens up a $200 billion market and could add $20 billion in sales this fiscal year. “All of our customers are quite excited about Vera,” he said. Reuters

Huang isn’t leaving China, despite U.S. export restrictions and Beijing trying to build up its homegrown chip makers. Asked in Taipei if China was part of the $200 billion CPU market, he said yes. He said Nvidia has U.S. licenses to send H200 chips to China, but the company hasn’t gotten Chinese approval and hasn’t shipped any.

That’s the risk. A Seeking Alpha piece from Bears of Wall Street kept its Sell call after the report, saying strong revenue was already in the price. The note also pointed to inventory buildup, China exclusion, customer concentration and questions about hyperscaler capex as potential issues for the stock.

Bulls are easy to find. A Yahoo Finance-linked article pitched that if Nvidia went back to 40 times forward earnings by the end of 2026, shares could climb around 66% from about $215. That’s a valuation view, not guidance from the company.

Morningstar analyst Brian Colello bumped his fair value estimate for Nvidia up to $280 following the numbers, saying the stock “appear undervalued to us.” He said demand in the data-center business is still widespread. Hyperscale cloud clients make up about half the segment, and the rest comes from AI cloud, industrial and enterprise buyers. Morningstar

Competition looks different now. Reuters said Nvidia is being squeezed by Intel and AMD in the CPU and inference spaces, and big cloud customers are designing their own chips too. Marvell told investors this week its custom-chip revenue should pass $10 billion by fiscal 2029. CEO Matt Murphy said the company is “custom engagements across the board at all the U.S. hyperscalers.” Reuters Reuters

Dell bumped its fiscal 2027 AI-server sales target to $60 billion, up from $50 billion, after first-quarter revenue surged 88%. The company credited demand for Nvidia-powered servers. The numbers point to strong AI infrastructure spending, even as investors diversify among suppliers.

Nvidia’s massive scale is a double-edged sword. CEO Jensen Huang said Vera Rubin could face “supply-constrained through the entire life” of the platform. China is still not in Nvidia’s data-center compute outlook. If cloud buyers cut spending, buy more in-house chips or if export rules keep closing off markets, Nvidia’s next earnings beat might not move a $5 trillion market cap. Reuters

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Khadija Saeed is a financial markets reporter at TS2.tech. Her coverage ranges from stocks and technology to emerging industries and developments across global markets. She studied economics and finance at the London School of Economics and worked in market research before becoming a financial journalist. Follow Khadija Saeed on Google News.

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