Nvidia slides 13% in three days after briefly becoming most valuable company

Since briefly becoming the world's most valuable company last week, Nvidia has dropped for three consecutive trading days and is now down 13% from its peak.

Monday's slide was the chipmaker's second steepest drop of the year, as the stock fell 6.7% to $118.11. Nvidia's decline brought with it a slide in chipmakers and other tech companies that have been tied to the artificial intelligence boom.

Super Micro Computer, which sells servers packed with Nvidia's AI chips, fell 8.7 percent, and Dell, which competes in that market, was off 5.2%.

Chip designer Arm dropped 5.8%, while semiconductor giants Qualcomm and Broadcom dropped 5.5% and 3.7%, respectively.

Many of these companies have been some of the biggest gainers in the last couple of years as investors bet heavily that they'll be the prime beneficiaries of a wave of AI spending.

Nvidia's value has nearly tripled in the past year even after the three-day slump. Last week, it topped Apple and Microsoft as the most valuable U.S. company with a market capitalization over $3 trillion before giving up some of those gains. Nvidia was the fourth-biggest loser in the S&P 500 on Monday. Super Micro is still up almost 200% in 2024.

Investors may be taking an opportunity to lock in gains after a few hot months.

"I don't think the party is over, but it's had a heck of a run and there are so many other places in technology that offer better attractive risk/reward," Hightower's Stephanie Link told CNBC on Friday, calling Nvidia shares "overloved."

Nvidia has said that demand for its prized AI graphics processing units (GPUs) remains high, as companies including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Oracle, and Meta buy billions of dollars worth of the chips to power their data centers and cloud