This week President Donald Trump announced that his long-term plan to put tariffs on non-American-made goods would go into effect, and Nvidia, a company headquartered in America but whose products are mostly manufactured out of Taiwan, has already taken a hit in its stock price.
The price fell 9% on Monday night and 12% over the last week. This is in response to Trump confirming that the 25% Canada and Mexico tariffs would be going ahead, alongside a further 10% tariff on goods from China. Nvidia's market cap has since gone from north of $3 trillion down to $2.73 trillion as of the time of writing. This is one of a handful of times Nvidia stock has been hit by major drops over the last few months.
Trump's cabinet originally suggested a rollout date for its tariffs in February, which was paused until March 4. When Trump announced his tariffs would go through, there was likely some expectation that it too would be held back until some sort of trade agreement was made.
These tariffs will raise the cost of goods coming into the country in an effort to push consumers to buy American products and coerce non-American companies into moving their manufacturing to America. Just this January, Nvidia's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang congratulated Trump on his electoral win and said, "I'd be delighted to go see him and congratulate him, and do everything we can to help this administration succeed." TSMC, in turn, announced a $100 billion investment into US production, including three new fabs.
Nvidia, which made $26 billion in a quarter due to data centre demands, is not only a big player in the gaming space but in general computing, with its chips powering servers, robotics, and AI. Though this stock dip is substantial, it's worth noting that Nvidia stock is up 50% from this time last year and up over 400% from just two years ago.
Nvidia stock started to boom even more from December 2023 onward, and this is the biggest hit in a week since the launch of DeepSeek R1 AI saw a $600 billion loss in January. It has just launched the RTX 5090, RTX 5080, and RTX 5070 Ti, with the RTX 5070 still to come, and these tariffs could affect consumers' chances of getting cards that are already proving quite difficult to get.
Just last month, gaming's largest lobbying group said that Trump's tariffs "would negatively impact hundreds of millions of Americans", and consumer GPUs being even more expensive is just one of the ways that could happen. With AMD's manufacturing also heavily reliant on Taiwan, your chances of getting a Radeon RX 9000 series card at MSRP are diminishing too.
The recent stock plummet likely won't hurt Nvidia that much in the long run if previous falls are anything to go by, but Mexico, Canada, and China have all threatened retaliatory tariffs, and even the CEOs of Best Buy and Target predict the consumer will take the brunt of these actions.
