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The trade-war selloff took a breather earlier on Tuesday, buoying Big Tech firms including Nvidia (NVDA), Tesla (TSLA), Meta (META), and Microsoft (MSFT), after a mixed day on Monday and two especially gnarly days last week wiped $1.8 trillion off the market value of leading tech stocks.
The moment’s shifting investor outlook seemed wrapped up in hopes that deals will soon emerge from President Donald Trump’s tariff talks; investors chased that glimmer of light by boosting Nvidia stock by more than 5% earlier in the day.
Nvidia then shed most of those gains; it was up 1.4% at around 2:40 p.m. Eastern, while Tesla was down roughly 2%, Microsoft and Meta were mostly flat, Amazon (AMZN) was down 0.8%, and Apple (AAPL) was down 3.2%.
Regarding the president’s as-of-yet unrealized tariff deals, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Tuesday that he thinks investors will “see a couple of big trading partners do deals very quickly.”
Just yesterday, Big Tech’s recent losses had the stocks of Apple, Microsoft, and Google’s parent company Alphabet (GOOGL) approaching one-year lows. Apple, which relies on factories in China to build its iPhones, is among the tech giants most vulnerable to sweeping tariffs.
A temporary workaround for the Cupertino firm may include sending more of its India-built iPhones to the U.S. market to dodge the worst of the president’s tariffs. Temporarily exempt chipmakers and advertising giants (think: Nvidia and Meta) may fare better than hardware-focused companies such as Apple, but no tech giant is invulnerable to the fallout. Tariffs could take a bite out of the corporate ad budgets that firms like Meta subsist on, while tariffs-induced price hikes could slow gadget sales and ultimately hit chipmakers’ bottom lines.