AI Pause Talk Sends Nvidia, AMD and Intel Shares Lower

Nvidia, AMD and Intel shares fell on Monday after leading AI executives urged a slower pace for frontier model development. Nvidia slid more than 2% in premarket trading, AMD fell about 5% and Intel dropped nearly 6%. Nasdaq 100 futures were down roughly 1.7% early in the session.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for pacing capability advances over the weekend. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and xAI founder Elon Musk broadly supported the appeal.

Investors reacted to the potential change in timing for some data-center demand rather than to a confirmed drop in current chip orders. Market participants said that if frontier releases are paced, demand for new data-center hardware could arrive more gradually.

Software names including ServiceNow, Adobe and Workday rose in premarket trading as some investors reassessed how quickly AI might affect enterprise software.

“The strongest arguments for caution are those grounded in evidence, not fear,” Brian Jacobsen, chief economist at Annex Wealth Management, warned.

Dan Ives, a technology analyst, described Amodei’s proposal as an effort aimed at industry self-regulation and added, “the reality is China won’t slow down anytime soon.”

Four days earlier, Piper Sandler initiated coverage across the AI semiconductor sector. The firm called Nvidia the market leader with roughly 80% of AI compute and set a $300 price target. It began coverage of AMD at Overweight with a $600 target, citing server-CPU gains and a ramp of its Helios GPU platform, and assigned Intel a Neutral rating with a $110 target, citing greater execution and valuation risk.

Analysts and market observers noted that slowing frontier releases would not necessarily stop hardware purchases. Safety testing, model evaluation, inference workloads, sovereign AI projects and deployment of existing models can continue to consume data-center capacity.

Trading on Monday reflected differing investor responses: some traders reduced positions in high-flying chip stocks, while others used the pullback to add exposure. Market participants continued to monitor company guidance and order flows for signs of a sustained change in demand.