NEW YORK, March 11, 2026, 09:08 EDT
Nvidia was steady near $185 in premarket trading on Wednesday, following news the chip giant will pour $2 billion into AI cloud player Nebius. That’s another addition to a string of AI investments ahead of its GTC developer event. The stock ended Tuesday at $184.77, gaining 1.16%.
Timing’s a factor here. After Nvidia topped its quarterly revenue targets on Feb. 25, markets didn’t get the stock pop they’d come to expect. Oracle, stepping in late Tuesday, projected AI-driven growth out through at least 2027—signaling, at least for now, that data-center appetite hasn’t faded. eMarketer analyst Jacob Bourne described Oracle’s showing as “a beat and a stress test result for the AI trade.” Reuters
Nvidia barely gets a breather before its next big moment: the GTC conference kicks off March 16-19 in San Jose. Chief Executive Jensen Huang is set to walk through what’s next on chips, AI factories, open models, and the so-called “agentic” systems—software built to take on more tasks with less human nudging. There’s an analyst Q&A lined up for March 17. UBS’s Timothy Arcuri, per Barron’s, wants clarity on scaling and networking. Truist’s William Stein, meanwhile, is watching for timing on Vera Rubin shipments and any fresh info on what follows—Feynman, the post-Rubin platform. NVIDIA Investor Relations
Nebius’ agreement comes on the heels of Tuesday’s news: Thinking Machines Lab, which was set up by ex-OpenAI technology chief Mira Murati, is set to secure at least a gigawatt of Nvidia’s next-gen Vera Rubin systems through a multi-year partnership. According to industry execs speaking with Reuters, a gigawatt of compute doesn’t come cheap—roughly $50 billion.
“AI is the most powerful knowledge discovery instrument in human history,” Huang said in Nvidia’s post about the Thinking Machines partnership. Murati described Nvidia’s technology as “the foundation on which the entire field is built.” Those statements drive home the point: Nvidia’s valuation is still closely tied to the broader AI expansion—not just to this quarter’s chip sales. NVIDIA Blog
Nebius is targeting over 5 gigawatts of data-center capacity by 2030, and it’s working on AI data centers that will be co-designed around Nvidia hardware, according to the Financial Times. That approach lines up with broader industry moves: earlier this month, Reuters said Nvidia was putting $2 billion apiece into photonics suppliers Lumentum and Coherent—key players whose technology accelerates data transfer inside AI systems.
But rivals aren’t waiting around. Broadcom, just last week, projected AI chip sales topping $100 billion by 2027—a signal that custom silicon is carving out a spot next to Nvidia’s GPUs, the backbone chips for powering and training AI models. “Meta’s AMD deal was a blow to Nvidia,” said Dan Coatsworth, head of markets at AJ Bell, pointing out that top buyers want options, not a single-supplier risk. Reuters
Here’s the rub for shareholders. Nvidia shares slid post-earnings last month, even as Jacob Bourne noted the company topped expectations once again—yet “the competitive picture is also shifting,” with Meta now eyeing AMD and cloud providers ramping up spending on their own silicon. Investors face choppy waters too: U.S. stock futures edged down after Wednesday’s in-line inflation read, and Reuters’ Morning Bid pointed out oil and equities remain stuck as traders eye the Middle East conflict. So next week’s GTC shapes up as the next real gauge for whether new deals can actually juice the shares. Reuters
