Nvidia’s Korean Megadeal and Japanese Robot Pivot Mask a Stock That’s Going Nowhere Fast
Published on 07/26/2026 at 15:32 | Redaktion boerse-global.de
Jensen Huang spent the past week shuttling between two of Asia’s most important technology capitals, signing agreements that collectively run into the hundreds of billions of dollars. Yet Nvidia’s share price barely budged.
The stock closed Friday at €182.00 in European trading, down 0.8 percent on the day and roughly 10 percent below its 52-week high of €202.50 set in May. The relative strength index of 52.6 points to a market that is neither overbought nor oversold — a picture of studied indifference rather than excitement.
That subdued reaction stands in stark contrast to the scale of what Nvidia announced. Over the weekend, the chipmaker confirmed its largest single partnership in South Korea: a memorandum of understanding with the SK Group worth more than $500 billion covering AI data centers and memory supply. The centerpiece is a 2-gigawatt AI data center from SK Telecom that will use Nvidia’s upcoming Vera Rubin platform and SK Hynix’s HBM4 memory. The first facility is scheduled to go live in 2027, part of a broader 15-gigawatt expansion plan by SK Telecom.
The SK deal is embedded in an even larger web of Korean technology alliances. Nvidia is also investing $1 billion in the Korean internet giant Naver, while infrastructure investor Brookfield is contributing up to $9 billion, creating a combined $10 billion alliance for an AI factory in Sejong that could eventually scale to one gigawatt of capacity and 100,000 graphics processors. Taken together with a separate $200 billion agreement between Samsung and Broadcom for memory chips and 2-nanometer fabrication, Korean tech companies have now closed nearly $950 billion in fresh AI partnerships with US firms. SK Hynix separately signed a long-term memory supply deal with Microsoft, and SK Telecom is collaborating with Anthropic.
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Huang’s assessment of South Korea was characteristically blunt: the country has “all the ingredients” for a successful AI ecosystem.
The Japan Gambit
Days earlier, Huang was in Tokyo meeting with the chiefs of Toyota, Fujitsu, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Fanuc and Kioxia. The topic was “physical AI” — the application of artificial intelligence to robotics and factory automation. Three major Japanese robotics and automation companies — Kawasaki, Fanuc and Yaskawa — are already using Nvidia’s technology.
“The next frontier of AI is in the physical world, and that is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Japan,” Huang said during the visit.
Nvidia has adjusted its reporting structure to highlight these emerging growth drivers. Its data center business generated $75 billion in revenue last quarter, up 92 percent year over year. The edge computing segment, which includes robot training, grew 29 percent. For now, data centers remain the dominant engine, while robotics is a long-term bet that will take years to pay off.
A Billion-Dollar Backlog
One factor that keeps analysts bullish despite the stock’s stagnation is Nvidia’s order book. Confirmed demand now stands at $1 trillion through 2027, according to current calculations. Huang had previously cited roughly $500 billion in AI chip orders for 2025 and 2026 combined. Those figures underscore how deeply embedded Nvidia’s hardware has become in the infrastructure plans of the world’s largest technology companies.
The valuation tells a more tempered story. At 23 times expected earnings and with projected annual profit growth of roughly 44 percent over the coming years, investors are paying no premium for the long-term potential of physical AI. That is a far cry from the multiples Nvidia commanded during its blistering run in 2023 and 2024.
Growth Deceleration Is Real
The arithmetic is straightforward. Revenue in the second quarter of fiscal 2026, which ended April 26, rose 85 percent year over year to $81.6 billion, beating already ambitious Wall Street estimates. But analysts expect revenue growth of roughly 219 percent between fiscal 2026 and 2029. In the preceding three years combined, Nvidia grew by about 700 percent.
For a company of Nvidia’s size, a 219 percent expansion over three years remains extraordinary. But investors who grew accustomed to triple-digit annual gains — 239 percent in 2023, 171 percent in 2024, 39 percent in 2025 — are now recalibrating. Year to date in 2026, the stock is up 13.55 percent, a pace that looks modest against its own history.
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Huang himself acknowledged the scale of what lies ahead. In an interview with Axios co-founder Mike Allen, he said the global semiconductor industry must grow tenfold over the next decade to meet demand from AI agents and robotics. Bottlenecks in memory chips, physical space and electricity could slow that expansion, he added, but would also buy time for the necessary infrastructure buildout. On fears of an AI bubble, Huang was dismissive: the current investment surge is not hype but a fundamental shift in computing infrastructure. “This time is different,” he said.
The Policy Front
Alongside the commercial blitz, Nvidia waded into Washington politics. An open letter it initiated titled “Open Weights and American AI Leadership” doubled its signatories from 25 to 50 organizations in a single day, adding OpenAI, Google, AMD, Cisco and Cloudflare. The letter warns against blanket restrictions on open AI models. Notably absent were Amazon and Anthropic — the latter has argued that open models pose security risks. The US government is reportedly considering stricter rules for Chinese AI developers, including entity-list designations and procurement restrictions.
What Comes Next
Nvidia’s next quarterly report is expected in late August. It will show whether the stock’s deceleration in 2026 reflects a genuine cooling in AI infrastructure spending or merely a pause after years of exceptional gains. Until then, the Japanese robotics partnerships and the multiyear order backlog are the optimists’ main arguments, while competitive pressure in the data center market remains under close watch.
The disconnect between Nvidia’s strategic ambition and its stock price is striking. The company is simultaneously building a $500 billion Korean alliance, pushing into Japanese factory automation, and lobbying Washington on AI policy. Its CEO is predicting a tenfold expansion of the chip industry. Yet the market is treating all of this as business as usual — priced in, but not yet exciting enough to drive the stock higher.
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