NEW YORK, December 29, 2025, 16:08 ET — After-hours
- Nvidia fell in late trading after Intel disclosed it completed a $5 billion private stock sale to the AI chip leader.
- The deal cements Nvidia’s minority stake in Intel at a fixed $23.28 per share, first agreed in September.
- Investors are weighing year-end risk appetite, Fed signals, and Nvidia’s next earnings date in late February.
Nvidia Corporation shares slipped on Monday after Intel confirmed it completed a $5 billion private stock sale to the AI chip designer, formalizing a minority stake first announced in September. Nvidia was last down 1.3% at $188.01 in late regular trading, while Intel rose 1.3% and Advanced Micro Devices was little changed.
The transaction matters now because investors are scrutinizing how the biggest AI winners deploy cash as 2025 closes and positioning resets for 2026. It also pulls Nvidia deeper into Intel’s turnaround efforts, where capital and execution on manufacturing plans remain core questions for the sector.
Big-cap tech softened in holiday-thinned trading, leaving Nvidia’s tape sensitive to broader sentiment around AI spending and interest rates. “This is not the beginning of the end of the tech dominance — it’ll turn out to be a buying opportunity,” said Hank Smith, director and head of investment strategy at Haverford Trust; investors are also watching Fed minutes and weekly jobless claims later this week. 1
In a Form 8-K filing, Intel said it completed the issuance and sale of 214,776,632 shares to Nvidia on Dec. 26 for $5.0 billion in cash, or $23.28 a share. The sale was a private placement — stock sold to a single investor rather than through a public offering — using an exemption for transactions that do not involve a public sale. 2
Reuters reported earlier Monday that the purchase carried out the September agreement and that U.S. antitrust agencies had cleared the investment earlier in December, citing a notice posted by the Federal Trade Commission. The filing confirmed the mechanics of a deal that has been widely viewed on Wall Street as a financial lifeline for Intel after years of capital-intensive expansion. 3
In September, Nvidia and Intel said they planned to supply chips to each other and build multiple generations of joint products that connect Intel’s central processors with Nvidia’s AI and graphics chips using NVLink, Nvidia’s proprietary high-speed interconnect. Reuters has reported the partnership could also involve Intel Foundry supplying CPUs for those joint products and packaging some Nvidia chips, even without a direct pledge to manufacture Nvidia’s top chips on Intel’s most advanced node. 4
For Nvidia investors, the key question is whether the relationship stays limited to platform integration or evolves into a meaningful shift in the supply chain. Any ramp in Intel foundry services would be read as a hedge against capacity constraints and geopolitics, but it could also complicate Nvidia’s vendor strategy.
The timing adds another variable: the final week of a holiday-shortened schedule can exaggerate moves as liquidity fades and portfolios rebalance. That backdrop can amplify stock reactions to filings and incremental deal updates that might otherwise be shrugged off.
Traders are also parsing what the Intel stake signals about Nvidia’s broader capital allocation as the AI buildout matures. In that debate, the line between strategic investments and financial cross-holdings has become a recurring theme in megacap tech.
Markets are closed Thursday for New Year’s Day, keeping the focus on a light macro calendar and positioning into year-end. Rate-sensitive tech has tended to move with Treasury yields, making any shift in policy expectations a key swing factor for Nvidia’s near-term tape.
Nvidia’s next major company catalyst is its fourth-quarter fiscal 2026 results, scheduled for Feb. 25, 2026, according to its investor events calendar. Investors will be looking for commentary on data-center demand, supply conditions for new accelerators, and whether strategic investments are beginning to influence margins or cash returns. 5
Ahead of that, traders will watch for follow-on disclosures about how Nvidia intends to treat the Intel stake and whether the companies provide clearer product timelines. For now, Monday’s filing answered the mechanical question of whether the $5 billion transaction would close; the market’s next test is whether the partnership turns into measurable commercial momentum.
