NVIDIA Stock Is Down 18% in 2026. Is the AI Leader Finally Cheap?

Key Stats for NVIDIA Stock

• Current Price: $192.53
• Target Price (Mid): ~$505
• Street Target: ~$300
• Potential Total Return: ~162%
• Annualized IRR: ~23% / year
• Earnings Reaction: -1.77% (May 20, 2026)

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What Happened?

NVIDIA (NVDA) is the company that built the AI era, and in 2026, it has been among the worst-performing major chip stocks in the market. The shares closed at $192.53 on June 26, down about 18% from the May 14 record of $235.47. Over the same stretch, the VanEck Semiconductor ETF has climbed sharply, Micron has nearly tripled, and AMD has roughly doubled. NVIDIA has been left behind by the very boom it created.

That is the disconnect that investors cannot resolve. The business is not slowing. In its fiscal Q1 2027 report, NVIDIA posted record revenue of $81.6 billion, up 85% year over year. Yet the stock kept sliding, and even that record print drew a muted reaction: shares fell 1.77% the session after the May 20 report. CEO Jensen Huang has publicly called the stock’s decline a mystery he cannot reconcile with the fundamentals. When the founder of a near-$5 trillion company says that, it tells you the market and the business have stopped agreeing.

So the question is no longer whether NVIDIA is a great company. It is whether the fear pulling the stock lower is rational, or whether it is quietly building the best entry point the AI leader has offered in years.

What Is Actually Pulling NVIDIA Lower

The selloff has specific drivers, and they are worth naming. The clearest is price. The hourly cost to rent NVIDIA’s flagship B200 GPU, the chip that runs large-scale data centers, fell from $6.11 on May 30 to $4.22 by June 21, a roughly 31% drop in three weeks. That figure comes from Ornn’s live compute dashboard, which functions as a real-time gauge of AI demand against capacity. Falling rental prices suggest compute supply is now being built faster than new workloads are arriving, and that reads as a warning on NVIDIA’s pricing power.

The second driver is rotation. As NVIDIA has stalled, “hot money” has moved into memory names, with Micron and Sandisk both surging on the AI memory cycle. The third is China: NVIDIA’s data center revenue from the country has fallen to effectively zero under tightening export controls, after contributing billions a year earlier. The fourth is sentiment, as NVIDIA insiders sold about $410.6 million in stock over the past three months. None of these is a broken-thesis signal on its own. Together, they explain why a record quarter has not put a floor under the stock.

Consequently, this effectively inserts Visa’s trusted infrastructure directly into machine-to-machine payments.

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Why the Demand Picture Is Sturdier Than the Tape

Set against that, management’s own framing of demand is the strongest counterweight. At the Bank of America 2026 Global Technology Conference on June 4, CFO Colette Kress sized NVIDIA’s forward supply obligations directly. “We’re essentially at about $124 billion of commitments,” said Colette Kress, Executive Vice President and CFO. That matters because companies do not lock in nine-figure supply years ahead unless they expect the demand to be there.

Kress also pushed back hard on the idea that custom chips will commoditize NVIDIA’s hardware. Asked whether buyers are chasing any available compute signals commoditization, she said it is “actually the opposite,” because the demands of agentic AI force customers toward best-of-breed systems. Agentic AI, meaning software that reasons and acts on its own rather than just answering prompts, needs far more compute per task. Her point on custom silicon was blunt: an application-specific chip is fixed at the moment it is designed, while NVIDIA can revise its full platform in software over time. That software depth is the part of the moat that the rental-price debate ignores.

The demand base is also broader than the bear case assumes. Kress detailed a roughly 50/50 split between hyperscalers and a fast-growing group of AI-focused clouds serving enterprises, sovereigns, and regional markets, which she called the fastest-growing piece of the business. A more diversified demand base is harder to break than one tied to four hyperscaler budgets.

Where the Valuation Sits Now

Here is where the math gets interesting. NVIDIA trades at around 19x NTM (next twelve months) P/E, below the broader market multiple and far below its own history. Against peers in the TIKR Competitors data, the gap is stark. NVIDIA’s roughly 19x forward P/E compares with AMD near 60x and Broadcom around 23x. For the fastest grower in the group, carrying a 74.1% TTM (trailing twelve months) gross margin and an LTM ROIC (return on invested capital) of 77.2%, paying less than slower-growing rivals reads more like relative value than a warning.

The Street has kept moving up even as the stock has fallen. The mean target rose from around $269 in April to roughly $300 in June, implying about 56% upside, with 48 Buys, 10 Outperforms, 2 Holds, 0 Underperforms, and 1 Sell. The risk that hangs over all of it is multiple compression: a stock priced at the world’s largest market cap has little room for any growth disappointment, and the falling rental index is exactly the kind of data point that could feed one.

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TIKR Advanced Model Analysis

• Current Price: $192.53
• Target Price (Mid): ~$505
• Potential Total Return: ~162%
• Annualized IRR: ~23% / year

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The TIKR mid-case, realized on January 31, 2031, values NVDA at around $505, a total return of roughly 162% over the next 4.6 years and an annualized IRR of around 23%. The two revenue CAGR drivers are continued hyperscaler capital spending and the Vera Rubin ramp reaching enterprise, sovereign, and AI-cloud customers, supporting mid-case revenue growth of around 23%. The margin driver is a data center operating leverage holding a net income margin of around 55%. The primary risk is multiple compressions, since the premium leaves little room for any growth stumble.

The upside case: agentic compute demand stays strong, and Vera Rubin ramps on schedule, pushing growth and margins toward the high end. 

The downside case: GPU rental prices keep sliding, and hyperscaler spending normalizes, compressing both the multiple and the growth rate at once.

Conclusion

The single number to watch is the B200 GPU rental price. If it keeps falling toward $3 per hour through the second half of 2026, that points to genuine demand softening rather than a pause before the Vera Rubin upgrade, and the bear case earns its weight. If it stabilizes or turns up as Vera Rubin ramps in the quarter ending October 2026, NVIDIA’s fiscal Q3 2027, the late-June selloff will look like noise over a record business. The quarter reports are due in late November 2026. Read alongside the rental index, that print will tell you which story is real.

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Should You Invest in NVIDIA?

The only way to really know is to look at the numbers yourself. TIKR gives you free access to the same institutional-quality financial data that professional analysts use to answer exactly that question.

Pull up NVIDIA, and you’ll see years of historical financials, what Wall Street analysts expect for revenue and earnings in the quarters ahead, how valuation multiples have moved over time, and whether price targets are trending up or down.

You can build a free watchlist to track NVIDIA alongside every other stock on your radar. No credit card required. Just the data you need to decide for yourself.

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Disclaimer:

Please note that the articles on TIKR are not intended to serve as investment or financial advice from TIKR or our content team, nor are they recommendations to buy or sell any stocks. We create our content based on TIKR Terminal’s investment data and analysts’ estimates. Our analysis might not include recent company news or important updates. TIKR has no position in any stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading, and happy investing!