Nvidia shares had run up in advance of the event, but CEO Jensen Huang didn't mention Rubin, the company's next chip family
Nvidia Corp. shares made a run higher in the days leading up to Chief Executive Jensen Huang's CES keynote, but they fell sharply Tuesday in the wake of the speech.
Part of that could reflect investors "selling the news" of the event, which brought announcements around a personal supercomputer running a new Blackwell chip as well as a partnership involving driverless-truck technology.
Nvidia shares sank 6.2% on Tuesday, their worst one-day percentage drop since a 9.5% decline seen Sept. 3, 2024. The stock was one of the S&P 500's SPX biggest losers on the day.
But Wall Street might also be disappointed that at least one thing was missing from Huang's Monday night address: discussion of the Nvidia $(NVDA)$ chip family that will follow Blackwell.
"While Jensen Huang, as expected, delivered a broad master-class on the current state and direction of the [artificial-intelligence] industry, and made several technically interesting announcements that together further extend the company's hardware and software industry leadership, we believe many investors were hoping for more concrete progress updates on the ramp of Blackwell and some input as to the company's progress with its next-generation GPU platform, Rubin," Benchmark Research analyst Cody Acree wrote in a note to clients.
There was talk of Blackwell, including when Huang mentioned that it's in full production. But Acree noted that "there was zero mention of Rubin, although to be fair, this next-generation design is not expected until 2026."
Stifel analyst Ruben Roy noted that Huang's announcements were "significant, but long-tailed (i.e. minimal impact to model)." For example, the company's new Project Digits AI supercomputer, which starts at $3,000, is "perhaps not a significant revenue needle mover," but could help deepen Nvidia's developer network.
"We view these developments as further deepening the company's competitive moat and positioning around potentially multi-billion dollar advancements tied to AI agents, robotics, autonomous vehicles, graphics and PC and edge-device inferences in the coming years," he said in a report.