By Martin Baccardax
Nvidia has found itself in the unusual position of having to launch a charm offensive as its status as the world's most valuable stock comes under increasing pressure from one of its biggest rivals in artificial intelligence.
"We're delighted by Google's success," Nvidia said in a statement shared with a broad range of media outlets, including Barron's, following Alphabet's launch of its Gemini 3 chatbot. The company then posted the same remarks on its verified social media account .
Google, which has developed its own AI chips, known as Tensor Processing Units, is also reportedly in talks to sell them to Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, for its Llama AI infrastructure.
But Nvidia wasn't finished. "They've made great advances in AI and we continue to supply to Google," the statement continued, before taking a turn from professional congratulations to self-promotion.
"Nvidia is a generation ahead of the industry [and] the only platform that runs every AI model and does it everywhere computing is done," the company said, before touting the superior performance, versatility and "fungibility" of its AI systems.
Nvidia has also privately pushed back against allegations of aggressive accounting practices levied by Big Short investor Michael Burry. Management referred to "off the charts" sales of its Blackwell chips when the company reported its third-quarter earnings last week.
Demand is certainly spectacular. CEO Jensen Huang told investors that demand for the Blackwell processors, and the soon-to-be-released Rubin chip, will reach $500 billion by the end of next year. And there is every chance we will hear hints of a more powerful, more efficient, and possibly more profitable iteration of Nvidia's rack-and-server system at the company's next developers' conference in March.
But the braggadocio both in terms of the AI investment cycle and Nvidia's place at the top of it, seems to belie a greater degree of concern than the company would likely admit. Tech investors have seemed skeptical about similar claims from other players in big tech.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp told investors on Nov. 7 that his company's third-quarter earnings were "arguably the best results that any software company has ever delivered." They weren't, and the stock fell 20% before beginning a modest rebound this week.
Not to be outdone, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, fresh from his victory in a Nov. 6 shareholder vote that could see him earn $1 trillion in stock over the next 10 years, declared the company had embarked upon "not merely a new chapter of the future of Tesla, but a whole new book." The stock has fallen nearly 10% since then.
Strategy's Michael Saylor, whose stock has fallen 54% over the past six months, told a Yahoo Finance event on Nov. 15 that there was "no doubt in my mind," that Bitcoin would be bigger than gold over the next decade. Strategy didn't buy any Bitcoin last week, despite the digital currency's 12% slump. Strategy's stock market value is now trading south of what its Bitcoin holdings are worth.
Nvidia is still the world's biggest stock, and it still sits at the epicenter of the world's biggest technological revolution. It has added more than $3 trillion in market value over the past two years and contributed directly to a growth boom that has kept the U.S. economy from sliding into recession.
The company will likely generate $93 billion in free cash flow this year, according to Gimme Credit's Dave Novosel, with a comfortable enough cushion on its balance sheet to buy back $50 billion in stock if it wanted to.
In other words, Nvidia isn't going away soon. But maybe, for the first time in years, it is going to have company.
Write to Martin Baccardax at martin.baccardax@barrons.com
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November 26, 2025 12:32 ET (17:32 GMT)
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