10 Stocks to Watch as Trade Wars Begin

2. NVIDIA Corp (NASDAQ:NVDA)

Number of Hedge Fund Investors: 193

Jim Cramer in a program earlier in April said that he’s “not selling” NVIDIA Corp (NASDAQ:NVDA) because he still believes AI demand is strong.

“Nvidia.. okay now listen to me for a second listen to me it’s down another 7% today it’s horrendous I’ve been saying that right is that if I hit that from you why Nvidia because the White House blessed its goods that are made Taiwan with no tariff to import and yet few noticed I know there’s a widespread belief that we’re seeing a slackening in demand for AI infrastructure all I can tell you is that I monitor this thing like a hawk and there hasn’t been a slackening it’s been in total acceleration move but nobody cares and I know it’s headed lower but at least you know why I’m not selling.”

The market will keep punishing Nvidia for not coming up to its gigantic (and sometimes unrealistic) growth expectations. About 50% of the company’s revenue comes from large cloud providers, which are rethinking their plans amid the DeepSeek launch and looking for low-cost chips. Nvidia is facing challenges at several levels. Competition is one of them. Major competitors like Apple, Qualcomm, and AMD are vying for TSMC’s 3nm capacity, which could limit Nvidia’s access to these chips. Why? Because Nvidia also uses  TSMC’s 3nm process nodes. Nvidia is also facing direct competition from other giants that are deciding to make their own chips. Amazon, with its Trainium2 AI chips, offers alternatives. Trainium2 chips could provide cost savings and superior computational power, which could shift AI workloads away from Nvidia’s offerings. Apple is reportedly working with Broadcom to develop an AI server processor. Intel is also trying hard to get back into the game with Jaguar Shores GPU, set to be produced on its 18A or 14A node.

Alger Spectra Fund stated the following regarding NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) in its Q1 2025 investor letter:

“NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) is a leading supplier of graphics processing units (GPUs) for a variety of end markets, such as gaming, PCs, data centers, virtual reality, and high-performance computing. The company is leading in most secular growth categories in computing, and especially artificial intelligence and super-computing parallel processing techniques for solving complex computational problems. In our view, Nvidia’s computational power is a critical enabler of AI and therefore essential to AI adoption. During the quarter, shares detracted from performance due to several factors. In January 2025, investor concerns grew regarding the emergence of advanced AI models from China, reportedly developed at lower costs and with reduced computing requirements, raising doubts about Nvidia’s market dominance. Additionally, U.S. President Donald Trump’s announcement of new tariffs targeting industries increased worries about higher operational costs. Despite these headwinds, Nvidia reported robust fiscal fourth-quarter results, highlighted by significant revenue growth driven by its data center segment. On the earnings call, CEO Jensen Huang emphasized the increasing computational requirements of future AI models, noting, “The more computation, the more the model thinks, the smarter the answer,” and adding that future reasoning models could demand substantially more compute resources. We believe Nvidia’s leadership in scaling AI infrastructure—including advancements in inference and reasoning during inference—continues to drive adoption among enterprises and startups, ensuring sustained demand for its high performance chips and software solutions. As older-generation chips are repurposed and new clusters deployed, we see Nvidia as well-positioned to capitalize on rising computational needs across AI applications.”