Nvidia stock declined Tuesday, even though the chip maker has added Apple to its roster of big-name customers. Details, however, are still scarce on exactly how big a deal it could be.
Nvidia shares fell 0.2% to $208.19, but recovered from an intraday low of $199.34 as the chip stocks selloff kicked back into gear after Wall Street bought the dip Monday.
The drop came despite news that Apple will use Nvidia’s graphics-processing units for at least part of its artificial-intelligence revamp, which the iPhone maker announced on Monday.
Apple normally prefers to use its own processors wherever possible and has been a notable holdout against the wave of investment in AI infrastructure that has made Nvidia the world’s largest company.
Part of the reason for the minimal share-price move could be that Apple is accessing Nvidia’s hardware through the cloud-computing services of Google rather than buying the chips directly. That might indicate it won’t result in significant new orders, at least for the time being.
“We are collaborating with Google and NVIDIA to run new Apple Intelligence workloads on Google Cloud, extending our industry-leading PCC [private cloud compute] privacy commitments to third-party data centers for the first time,” Apple said in a statement on Monday.
While Apple is working with Google and Nvidia, it also reiterated that much of its AI will operate directly on its devices, which could limit the amount of external infrastructure it needs.
Only Apple’s most advanced AI model—AFM 3 Cloud Pro, which will power AI agents and complex reasoning workloads—will run on Nvidia’s chips in Google’s cloud.
“The lineup reaffirms Apple’s ‘asset-light’ approach to AI versus the in-house builds of frontier labs and hyperscalers,” Oppenheimer analyst Martin Yang wrote in a research note.
Still, the choice of Nvidia hardware to run even some of Apple’s AI services is welcome validation that Nvidia’s chips still play a leading role in the sector, in the face of increasing competition from customized processors and central-processing unit specialists such as Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.
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