Chip stocks wobble as Nvidia P/E hits decade low and SambaNova raises $1B

Nvidia's forward price-to-earnings ratio fell to roughly 19 — its lowest in more than a decade — as chip stocks entered a rocky patch driven by interest-rate uncertainty and Middle East geopolitical tensions, Reuters reported. The compression is notable given Nvidia's continued dominance, suggesting investors are pricing in either slower growth or heightened competitive risk to its data-center franchise.

That competitive risk is materializing. SambaNova raised a $1 billion Series F (led by General Atlantic) on the thesis that the Nvidia-dominated inference stack has a structural ceiling, aiming to build a parallel enterprise inference-infrastructure layer. The bet aligns with the week's broader theme of inference-cost pressure — cheaper models and cheaper serving hardware both erode the premium GPU economics that inflated Nvidia's multiple.

Mechanically, the challenge to Nvidia is twofold: dedicated inference accelerators (SambaNova, and DeepSeek's rumored chip) attack the serving market, while software-layer disruption threatens CUDA's moat — a tiny London startup claims a CUDA compiler that runs CUDA code on AMD hardware faster than AMD's own tools, potentially loosening the software lock-in that keeps buyers on Nvidia.

Competitively, none of this dents Nvidia's near-term training dominance, but the combination of a decade-low multiple, funded challengers, and CUDA-portability efforts marks a shift in market psychology. Skeptics counter that Nvidia has repeatedly outrun such threats and that the P/E drop partly reflects macro fear, not fundamentals. Watch Nvidia's next earnings for data-center guidance and whether the CUDA-compiler claim survives independent testing.