Dan Niles Says NVIDIA (NVDA) $5.5 Billion Charge Shows Demand Issues – ‘They Can’t Resell Chips Anywhere Else’

We recently published a list of 10 Stocks Analysts are Talking About Amid Trump’s Tariff War. In this article, we are going to take a look at where NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) stands against other stocks analysts are talking about amid Trump’s tariff war.

Markets saw some glimmer of hope as President Donald Trump indicated that he does not plan to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and showed openness to engage in talks with China. However, China has said in a statement that the US should dial back all unilateral duties if it’s serious in negotiations.

Andrew Slimmon, Morgan Stanley Investment Management senior portfolio manager, explained in a recent program on CNBC what made Trump blink:

“I think…April 9th was an important day because on that day Trump came out and said I didn’t like what I saw in the bond market, I didn’t like Jamie Diamon saying there’s a recession coming and he said “So I’m putting a 90-day pause on.” So in my opinion, what he really said is tariffs are important to me but a recession’s worse and so there’s the priority which he basically gave you the indication there is a Trump put out there. I don’t think it’s down 10 15 but it was when the market was almost down 20 right, credit spread started to quake.”

READ ALSO: 7 Best Stocks to Buy For Long-Term and 8 Cheap Jim Cramer Stocks to Invest In.

For this article, we picked 10 stocks Wall Street is talking about these days. With each stock, we have mentioned the number of hedge fund investors. Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 373.4% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 218 percentage points (see more details here).

Dan Niles Says NVIDIA (NVDA) $5.5 Charge Shows Demand Issues - ‘They Can’t Resell Chips Anywhere Else’

A close-up of a colorful high-end graphics card being plugged in to a gaming computer.

NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA)

Number of Hedge Fund Investors: 193

Dan Niles, Niles Investment Management founder, said in a latest program on CNBC that NVIDIA’s (NASDAQ:NVDA) $5.5 billion inventory write-down following US export restrictions on the company shows that the company is facing demand issues.

“The first thing that crossed my mind was okay so you’re trying to sell a Ferrari whose top speed is 90 mph not 200. Well, you have to write that down to zero. You can’t find any other takers for this when supposedly the bull case is demand is far outstripping supply and you can sell—you know, supply is the limiting issue. So that’s the first thing that struck me is why are they taking a $5.5 billion write-down? But again, we’ve had a lot of data points on the other side such as Microsoft, you know, walking away from data center leases, power contracts, etc. And the innovations by DeepSeek which cuts cost to produce tokens by over 90% that are now being used in US models like Meta and you go “Okay, you know, I’ve been saying for a while there’s an AI digestion phase coming this year and there’s probably some signs that it—that it’s actually here, that they can’t resell these chips anywhere else in the world, despite supposedly demand being so amazing.”

The market will keep punishing Nvidia for not coming up to its gigantic (and sometimes unrealistic) growth expectations. About 50% of the company’s revenue comes from large cloud providers, which are rethinking their plans amid the DeepSeek launch and looking for low-cost chips. Nvidia’s Q1 guidance shows a 9.4% QoQ revenue growth, down from the previous 12% QoQ growth. Its adjusted margin is expected to be down substantially as well to 71%. The market does not like it when Nvidia fails to post a strong quarterly beat. The stock will remain under pressure in the coming quarters when the company will report unimpressive growth.

Nvidia is facing challenges at several levels. Competition is one of them. Major competitors like Apple, Qualcomm, and AMD are vying for TSMC’s 3nm capacity, which could limit Nvidia’s access to these chips. Why? Because Nvidia also uses TSMC’s 3nm process nodes. Nvidia is also facing direct competition from other giants that are deciding to make their own chips. Amazon, with its Trainium2 AI chips, offer alternatives. Trainium2 chips could provide cost savings and superior computational power, which could shift AI workloads away from Nvidia’s offerings. Apple is reportedly working with Broadcom to develop an AI server processor. Intel is also trying hard to get back into the game with Jaguar Shores GPU, set to be produced on its 18A or 14A node.

Alger Spectra Fund stated the following regarding NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) in its Q1 2025 investor letter:

“NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) is a leading supplier of graphics processing units (GPUs) for a variety of end markets, such as gaming, PCs, data centers, virtual reality, and high-performance computing. The company is leading in most secular growth categories in computing, and especially artificial intelligence and super-computing parallel processing techniques for solving complex computational problems. In our view, Nvidia’s computational power is a critical enabler of AI and therefore essential to AI adoption. During the quarter, shares detracted from performance due to several factors. In January 2025, investor concerns grew regarding the emergence of advanced AI models from China, reportedly developed at lower costs and with reduced computing requirements, raising doubts about Nvidia’s market dominance. Additionally, U.S. President Donald Trump’s announcement of new tariffs targeting industries increased worries about higher operational costs. Despite these headwinds, Nvidia reported robust fiscal fourth-quarter results, highlighted by significant revenue growth driven by its data center segment. On the earnings call, CEO Jensen Huang emphasized the increasing computational requirements of future AI models, noting, “The more computation, the more the model thinks, the smarter the answer,” and adding that future reasoning models could demand substantially more compute resources. We believe Nvidia’s leadership in scaling AI infrastructure—including advancements in inference and reasoning during inference—continues to drive adoption among enterprises and startups, ensuring sustained demand for its high performance chips and software solutions. As older-generation chips are repurposed and new clusters deployed, we see Nvidia as well-positioned to capitalize on rising computational needs across AI applications.”

Overall, NVDA ranks 2nd on our list of stocks analysts are talking about amid Trump’s tariff war. While we acknowledge the potential of NVDA as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that under the radar AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns, and doing so within a shorter time frame. There is an AI stock that went up since the beginning of 2025, while popular AI stocks lost around 25%. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than NVDA but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about this cheapest AI stock.

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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.