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Nvidia stock fell as much as 7% on Wednesday amid tariff pressure from President Trump.
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The stock is now down 20% this year, and faces a rocky road ahead.
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Shares are in a tough position as a lightning rod for all of the market’s assorted headwinds.
Nvidia investors can’t catch a break this year.
One thing after another seems to be knocking shares lower. If the pressure isn’t coming from competing Chinese AI models, it’s being applied by President Trump as he announces more tariffs on Nvidia-adjacent industries.
And that’s not to mention the stock’s status as one of the most valuable companies in the world, and a headlining member of the vaunted Magnificent 7. Its rapid increase over the past few years has only been rivaled by the major declines it experiences during times of market turbulence.
Nvidia’s rocky year continued on Wednesday as shares fell as much as 7% after the company said that it expects to take a $5.5 billion earnings hit because of Chinese tariffs levied by Trump.
The stock is now down 20% year-to-date and off about 30% from its January peak. Those losses far outpace the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100, which is down 12% in 2025.
Investors in Nvidia — formerly the market’s foremost darling — are being forced to come to grips with the stock’s position at the epicenter of multiple headwinds.
“Nvidia has found itself in the middle of many crosscurrents this year,” Paul Hickey, co-founder of Bespoke Investment Group, told BI on Wednesday.
Detailed below are three major forces holding Nvidia back in 2025:
This ultimately boils down to Nvidia’s sheer size and weighting in major indexes, which has resulted from the stock’s eye-watering climb in recent years.
Now that it’s one of the most valuable companies in the world, and the clear leader of the AI-chip revolution, expectations have been ratcheted up. After all, Nvidia has grown its annual revenue by 383% since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022.
“The stock has become a victim of its own success where the exponential growth following the release of ChatGPT became unsustainable given how large sales had become,” Hickey said.
The first warning of a potential slowdown in Nvidia’s growth rate was the release of a large-language model from China, named DeepSeek.
DeepSeek was significant in that it utilized nuanced efficiency gains that helped boost performance on par with mainstream GPTs, all while using significantly less computing power.
The swift decline in Nvidia stock was almost fully recovered in mid-February, as tech CEOs spun DeepSeek’s efficiency gains as a reason why AI should evolve even quicker.
