The peak of the AI frenzy has passed

(Image credit: Getty Images)

published 10 September 2024

A new month, a new market wobble. Global stocks began September with their worst sell-off since the early August shocker. America’s technology-focused Nasdaq Composite index dropped by 3.3% on 3 September, with artificial intelligence (AI) flagship Nvidia suffering a 9.5% slide. The resulting $279 billion fall in value marks the biggest one-day decline in the market cap of a US stock in history.

While last month’s plunge began in Japan, this time concern is focused squarely on America. Weak manufacturing data revived fears that the US is on the brink of recession. Nervous markets have become prone to exaggerate “the likely scale of the impending US economic slowdown”, triggering overreactions to small bits of bad data, says Katie Martin in the Financial Times.

While overvalued “monster” tech stocks flail, the rest of the world’s top economy isn’t looking too bad. Société Générale analysts note that 80% of US stocks beat earnings-per-share expectations in the most recent quarter. Investors should shift their attention from the narrow AI “bubble” to opportunities across the rest of the market, especially in “small- and mid-cap stocks”.

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How are AI companies performing?

The Nvidia sell-off came even though the company delivered another set of “blowout results” last week, says Ipek Ozkardeskaya of Swissquote Bank. The AI-chip specialist topped sales forecasts by $2 billion for the fifth consecutive quarter, served up an unexpectedly robust forecast for the current quarter and announced a big stock buyback. It still wasn’t enough. The shares fell 14% over the next three days.

Investor “fatigue” with the AI story is evident. Nvidia’s shares have dropped a fifth since a mid-June peak, but have still risen more than 600% since the beginning of last year. “Nvidia is doing fine,” says Dan Gallagher in The Wall Street Journal. The other tech giants lavished $58.5 billion on AI capital spending in the second quarter – great news for Nvidia, which captures a lot of that money by selling its high-end chips to these firms for their AI projects. Projected revenue for the current quarter came in 2% ahead of Wall Street targets, but investors have become used to even bigger beats – in the same quarter last year, revenue outperformed expectations by 28%.

There are question marks about whether this earnings windfall will be sustainable if consumer demand for AI services fails to appear and tech firms rein in AI spending, but there is little reason to panic yet. Nvidia enjoys huge profit margins of more than 50%, five times the average for the S&P 500 as a whole, says John Authers on Bloomberg. Investors were disappointed by signs that rising margins won’t continue forever. Talk about a reality check.

The Nvidia share price is unlikely “to burst”, but “speculative froth” is being removed. Peter Atwater of Financial Insyghts notes that prices of the most “speculative” AI trades actually peaked in the spring and have since dropped a fifth. As Atwater puts it, the “peak in the AI frenzy is behind us. Unappreciated by the crowd, it occurred in late February. As they always do, the worst left the party first”.

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Alex is an investment writer who has been contributing to MoneyWeek since 2015. He has been the magazine’s markets editor since 2019.

Alex has a passion for demystifying the often arcane world of finance for a general readership. While financial media tends to focus compulsively on the latest trend, the best opportunities can lie forgotten elsewhere.

He is especially interested in European equities – where his fluent French helps him to cover the continent’s largest bourse – and emerging markets, where his experience living in Beijing, and conversational Chinese, prove useful.

Hailing from Leeds, he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Oxford. He also holds a Master of Public Health from the University of Manchester.