Nvidia Stock Falls 3%, Why Its Partners Are Getting a Boost and It Isn't

Nvidia seems to be having better luck shifting the stock of partner companies than its own.

Just look at chips-and-networking player Marvell Technology or battery energy storage company Fluence Energy, both of which surged this week due to their collaborations with Nvidia.

While Nvidia is still the biggest artificial-intelligence chip player, excitement about AI hardware is currently centered around central-processing units, memory chips, and optical networking. Nvidia is struggling to get the market to focus on its graphic-processing units and its nascent stand-alone CPU business.

Nvidia shares were down 3% in market trading Wednesday.

A flurry of announcements at the Computex conference this week -- chief among them being Nvidia's new PC chip -- has given a relatively modest boost to Nvidia's stock. Investors are still waiting to see exactly how large the PC market can be for Nvidia, considering its processor will likely be aimed at premium devices and is relatively limited compared with data centers.

Still, as Barron's argued in our recent stock pick, Nvidia looks relatively cheap and so long as AI spending continues to increase it should be a major beneficiary.

"Nvidia has shown time and time again that it can continue to expand its share of spending across compute, networking, storage, robotics, and now into the PC market. We believe this expanded share of the technology spending will help support continued growth and earnings progress," wrote William Blair analyst Sebastien Naji in a research note Tuesday, reiterating an Outperform rating on the stock.

Nvidia shareholders will just have to be patient for now.