Nvidia hasn’t had to pivot too much on the geopolitical front, but finding itself in the midst of tariffs and trade wars has changed that in 2025
Illustration/Getty Images
New trade and tariff policies, geopolitical spats, and a race to monetize AI is making for some unique tech-sector dance partners in 2025 — and the latest one's a real eye-opener.
Exhibit “A” is Nvidia $NVDA’s September 18 alignment with computer networking giant Intel $INTC, in a partnership that pairs two of the best-known names in tech.
Under the terms of the deal, last month.
Join 500,000+ readers who start their day with Quartz.
By subscribing, you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
Nvidia will buy Intel shares for $23.28, slightly less than the company's closing price on Wednesday, but more than the $20.47 per share the government paid. The deal will require regulatory approvals and will make Nvidia a 4% owner of Intel.
The Intel news was immediately followed by a separate $2 billion Nvidia deal with the United Kingdom to expand the UK’s AI startup ecosystem and accelerate the creation of innovative companies and jobs. This deal aims to bring advanced AI infrastructure to major hubs such as London, Oxford, and Cambridge, “empowering researchers and developers nationwide to lead the next wave of globally transformative AI businesses,” Nvidia said in a statement.
With a multi-billion-dollar deal in place, and hundreds of billions of dollars on the table in the burgeoning artificial data center market, it’s the Intel deal that has the technology and financial markets sectors chattering. So what are potentially the biggest impactors with the deal?
Business and financial-market gurus advise, focusing on the following partnership factors.
Stock market mavens say there’s more than meets the eye beyond data-center investments and beefier stock prices for both companies.
Nvidia's "$5B investment in INTC is exactly what we suggested would be good for the company, country, and consumer when the U.S. government announced its 9.9% ownership in INTC," said Nancy Tengler, CEO at Laffer Tengler Investments. "The private sector can and will solve the INTC technology problem, one way or another, and the government has an abysmal record in trying to do so."
Tengler’s best guess on larger deal ramifications is a big one. “This may be the first step of an acquisition or break-up of the company among U.S. chip makers, though it is entirely possible the company will remain a shadow of its former self but will survive, she said. “Right now, we are long NVDA, Broadcom $AVGO (AVGO), Advanced Micro Devices (AMD $AMD), and Lam Research $LRCX Corp. (LRCX). These are the winners."
Nvidia hasn’t had to pivot too much on the geopolitical front, but finding itself in the midst of tariffs and trade wars has changed that line of thinking in 2025.
On September 17, China banned in-country technology companies from deploying Nvidia’s AI-powered microchips. That’s a big deal, as it blocks Chinese tech behemoths including Alibaba and ByteDance, both big prior NVDA customers, from purchasing Nvidia’s RTX Pro 6000D chips, even if they’ve already been ordered.
NVDA was already busy fending off Pacific Rim chip competitors and a ban on selling in China arrives at a difficult time.
“As chip prices in Taiwan inevitably come down, Nvidia will be at risk,” said Amrita Bhasin, co-founder and CEO of Sotira Companies, an AI-fueled supply chain company. “A smart company like Nvidia will always seek to hone an advantage or moat in any way they can, and controlling one's own chip production is a great way to compete.”
That’s the case as the cloud sector gets more saturated and providers feel their own pressure to cut costs and move operations in-house. “Nvidia needs to diversify or have a plan to diversify to remain competitive and justify share prices to stakeholders and attract the next generation of technical talent,” Bhasin noted.
Intel not only gets a big financial shot in the arm, but only days after signing a $10 billion pact with the U.S. government, its brand outlook gets a boost, too.
“For Intel, this is less about financial infusion and more about narrative rehabilitation,” said Shay Baloor, chief market strategist at Futurum, an Austin, Texas-based technology market intelligence company.
First up, Nvidia taking a 5% equity stake signals to the market that Intel still has a role to play in the AI supply chain. “It gives Intel a differentiated product in a space where it has been relegated to commodity host CPUs,” Baloor said. “Even if the company’s process technology lags, being the x86 partner with NVLink-native integration re-inserts Intel into the growth curve of AI data centers, where capital expenditures are compounding at massive growth rates annually.” (NVlink is a wire-based serial multi-lane near-range communications link developed by Nvidia.)
All of it reinforces a new core reality for the technology sector. “The AI economy will run on systems where NVLink is the standard, and NVIDIA decides who gets to plug in,” Baloor noted.
