Nvidia Secures $2B AI Chip Megadeal with Kazakhstan Amid $450B Market Cap Plunge
Nvidia just scored a $2 billion lifeline from Kazakhstan—right as its stock bled $450 billion in value. The AI chip giant's rollercoaster week proves even silicon gods can't defy gravity forever.
The Deal:
Astana bets big on Nvidia's AI hardware, locking in chips to power Central Asia's answer to Silicon Valley. No word on whether they'll use them to mine Bitcoin or actually build something useful.
The Fallout:
Wall Street's darling shed nearly half a trillion dollars in market cap—turns out 'AI supremacy' doesn't immunize you from good old-fashioned profit-taking (or panic selling).
Bottom Line:
When a petrostate throws you a $2B life raft during a $450B storm, maybe question who's really getting rescued here. Next stop: Nvidia-branded yurts in Nur-Sultan?
Kazakhstan makes AI bet while U.S. douses chip optimism
The new AI ministry will also advise Tokayev directly through a presidential AI Development Council.
Olaf Groth, a German-American council member, said the goal is not just digitization, but cognification; developing systems that think, analyze, and act.
Kazakhstan plans to leverage Nvidia’s chips to build compute capacity for everything from university research to national AI labs. It’s a MOVE to position the country as a regional broker for artificial intelligence development and services.
As Kazakhstan goes all-in, Nvidia’s stock is collapsing. On Thursday, the company’s shares dropped 3.6%, leading the entire tech sector lower. The fall started earlier in the week after comments from David Sacks, the Trump administration’s artificial intelligence and crypto policy lead.
In a post on X, Sacks said, “There will be no federal bailout for AI. The U.S. has at least five major frontier model companies. If one fails, others will take its place.” He added, “I don’t think anyone was actually asking for a bailout. (That WOULD be ridiculous.) But company executives can clarify their own comments.”
Sacks was reacting to a statement made the day before by Sarah Friar, the CFO of OpenAI, during a Wall Street Journal event. Friar had said OpenAI might benefit from a government guarantee to help finance AI chip infrastructure.
That comment triggered immediate backlash. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, later denied the company was requesting any government support or protection from failure.
AI giants scramble as valuations wobble and China pressure builds
The entire chip sector has been under pressure since Wednesday when Qualcomm released solid earnings, but investor fear around AI overvaluation tanked sentiment across the board.
Analysts are flagging that top AI companies Nvidia, AMD, Oracle, Broadcom, CoreWeave, and even Amazon are getting too entangled, with shared supply chains and overlapping partnerships making the sector/make look a tad too fragile.
Things got worse for Nvidia after CEO Jensen Huang made headlines for saying China “will win” the AI race in a comment given during an interview with the Financial Times.
Jensen followed up later on X, posting that China was only “nanoseconds behind” the U.S., but stressed, “It’s vital that America wins by racing ahead and winning developers worldwide.”
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