Musk's Nvidia-Only Pledge Crushes AMD, Lifts Chip Giant's Shares

Elon Musk dropped a market-moving bombshell by announcing that SpaceX — his rocket and AI company — would exclusively use Nvidia chips going forward, sending shockwaves through the semiconductor sector and reshuffling winners and losers in one of the market's hottest rivalries.

AMD bore the sharpest pain, tumbling 8.7% in premarket trading to claim the dubious title of worst performer in the S&P 500 — a brutal result made even more stinging by the timing. The company had just posted a second-quarter earnings beat, the kind of result that normally sends a stock higher, but Musk's declaration completely overshadowed any good news from the report. Intel also slipped, falling around 2%, as investors reassessed the competitive landscape for GPU-adjacent chip suppliers.

Nvidia, meanwhile, was the clear beneficiary. Its shares climbed roughly 2% on the news, adding to the momentum of a company already valued in the vicinity of $5 trillion — making it one of the most valuable corporations on the planet. Musk's exclusive endorsement functions as a powerful signal to the rest of the AI industry, where infrastructure decisions by major players like xAI and SpaceX carry outsized weight.

The episode underscores how fragile sentiment remains for AMD, which has been positioning its MI300 and successive GPU lines as credible Nvidia alternatives for AI workloads. A single statement from a high-profile customer choosing the competition can unwind significant investor confidence overnight, especially when the AI chip race is still widely seen as winner-take-most.