Nvidia’s GTC Conference Underway… And Fed Decision On Deck 3/18/25

0:00Live from the Nasdaq market site in the heart of New York City's Times Square. This is Fast money. Here's what's on tap tonight. Stocks in retreat after a recently rare two-day rally. Major markets pulling back today. The S &P and Nasdaq both going negative for the week. What this all means ahead of tomorrow's Fed decision. We'll debate that. And a MAG 7 meltdown. NVIDIA dropping on the first day of its GTC conference. Alphabet sinking as it inks its biggest deal ever. And now even Meta has given up its gains for the year. How the traders are eyeing the big tech stocks now. Plus, more troubles for the travel trade.

0:30The latest group getting hit by decreased demand and gold may be at a record high. But there's another metal that's outperforming this year. We'll tell you all about it and the traders' burning chart questions, the stocks they are watching, and what the chart master has to say about these trends. I'm Melissa Lee coming to you live from Studio B at the NASDAQ. On the desk tonight, Tim Seymour, Dan Nathan, Guy Dami, and Carter Braxton Wirth. We start off with all the headlines out of NVIDIA's GTC keynote. CEO Jensen Huang delivering a two-hour address today at the AI conference this afternoon. He announced a new GM partnership and gave release timelines for the company's Blackwell Ultra and Vera Rubin chips.

1:05But shares of the AI darling fell three and a half percent during the session, now down nearly 25 percent from their record. Our Christina Parts Nevelis is at the event in San Jose. She's got all the headlines. Christina. Well, the theme of this unscripted keynote for two hours was really about maintaining dominance in the face of increasing competition. Jensen Wong reiterating data centers are still a trillion dollar market cap by 2028. They're getting closer and closer to it, but that's a number we've heard before. As for the products, you briefly mentioned, Melissa, but we've got the expected Blackwell Ultra for this year, Vera Rubin for 2026, Vera Rubin Ultra for the back half of 2027.

1:44What you need to know is Jensen's fulfilling his promise of new chips every year. A question, though, still top of mind is will the demand follow? Jensen Wong reassuring the crowd that next generation AI will need 100 times more compute than older models. So think of it as him telling the audience, our customers will still need our chips for years to come. But with large language models like DeepSeq using less advanced computing hardware, concerns still linger on the magnitude of that demand. Other announcements, new photonic switches to connect GPUs, inferencing software, a partnership you mentioned with GM to make autonomous vehicles, negatively possibly affecting Mobileye, which fell today, a new quantum computing office, the first customizable humanoid robot, which can reason.

2:30But those are revenue streams that should really have a minimal impact just over the next five years or so. The speech was highly technical, as Jensen Wong detailed projects already previewed, many of them already previewed just over the last year or so. So I guess the big takeaway was no major surprises, clearly catering to a technical audience rather than investors, which may explain why the stock didn't really jump on all of these announcements, Melissa. Yeah. And Christine, as I understand that, there's a media call tomorrow so that Jensen, his feet might be held to the fire a little bit more in terms of the question that has emerged since DeepSeek, and that is, are the hyperscalers really going to change?

3:10Has there been any sort of change at all in terms of expectation for the need for compute power, which he did address in that two-hour keynote? Yeah, he did. But he addressed that same line in an interview on CNBC around earnings time as well. And to your point, the keynote, the Q &A with the press will be in the evening tomorrow. So you may not see as much of a stock reaction throughout the day. But be rest assured, I'll be there. There'll be others. And we will grill him with questions. All right, Christina, thank you. Christina Parts Nevelis, down three and a half percent. I guess they didn't answer that question.

3:45They did not answer that question in two hours. This is not granted for investors. This is not a meeting for investors. But still, that is what has been dogging the stock. Not a meeting for investors, but every investor is focused on the meeting. So it is a meeting for investors. And I think you're right. Look, Ruben looks like it's a second half 26 story. I think market probably knew that, number one. Margins didn't come up. Robotics, you know, multi-trillion dollar industry potentially. So he said all the things about the future that are exciting. But, you know, I don't think anything that's been concerning investors or traders, I don't think any of those concerns were swaged.

4:19And I continue to think that, you know, they might talk about a reacceleration of margins in the second half. I just don't see it happening. So this move actually makes sense to me. And this was not a scripted speech, my understanding. So this is a kind of a free-flowing dynamic. And to the extent that you could have just gotten a little bit more into where the new use cases, in other words, moving away from data centers, moving into there's talk about collaboration with GM on AI, et cetera, et cetera. So the trillion-dollar addressable market isn't really new. I think if you look at the stock, you know, from that Jan 7th, at least recent high, it's been making lower lows.

4:56So, I mean, we're going to talk about some of the other big mega-cap tech stocks. But there's nothing on the charts that tell you that this company is in a safe spot. And semis, you know, continue to look like they're vulnerable. Is Tim playing hurt here, Guy? Well, that tie would suggest he's playing something. I mean, what is that? Yeah, so does it get wider? Melissa told me she loves this time. She'd like me to wear it more often. Is he a little horse? Oh, she's laughing. As if that's not what she said. Say nay. Nay. The fever's broken in this trade. Let's just be clear here, right? So if this happened a year ago, whatever he said here, with those throngs of people there who were really excited, the stock probably would have been up 5%.

5:32We were looking through the options market. The implied move between today, this morning, and Friday's close was about 6 % in either direction. Just think about that, okay? So when you think about what's going on here, the expectations, I didn't think they were going to be particularly high. The company just reported a few weeks ago. They obviously didn't say any real big news for this sort of event, and they probably knew that. The one thing I'll just say is like lots of headlines. When Guy talks about margins not going up in the second half of this year, the information has an article out this morning that Amazon Web Services, they're offering their own chip to cloud customers, same performance as the H100 from NVIDIA, but at 25 % of the price.

6:08This is how any other semi-company who's coming into the space, they're going to compete on price, especially if they have the same performance as the last-gen sort of chips. So to me, listen, the story's great. They're expected to grow earnings and sales this year, 50%, trades it 25 times. Next year, it's supposed to grow 25%, expected, trades it 20 times. So if you're a valuation person and you believe what they're saying, then the stock is cheap here. But if you think that the fever's broken all around, if you think that the economy's going to get weaker, If you think their major customers are going to pull back in their capex at some point or diversify away from a single source, then the story is not that attractive right here.

6:46It doesn't really matter what Jensen Huang says. I mean, to play the role of Miss Silver Linings on this desk and somebody else is not doing that tonight. The fact that there is no new guidance after three weeks after reporting earnings. Maybe that is a good thing, considering how we have seen confidence drop off a cliff in so many other industries. For him to stick by that forecast, that wasn't enough still. No, I think you make a good point, right? Every opportunity to back away, the economy is slowing. Maybe CapEx is not going to be as robust. I think you're right to point it out. But I also think the market's trying to get in front of a potential slowdown and the potential for CapEx not to be as robust as many of these stocks have priced in.

7:28I think that's sort of the rub right now. Carter Braxton Worth, how do you read the charts here? What do you think? Well, I think, look, NVIDIA was the holdout, right? We know that the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index peaked in July, QER, March of the following year, and NVIDIA finally succumbed. So did Avago, Broadcom, of course, AVGO. But the point is that if you look at where we are in relation to 52-week highs, which is an important thing, the S &P down 10 percent, the tech sector down 14, 15, semiconductors as a group down 23, and the equal weight semiconductor index out of Philly down some 30 percent.

8:07So the irony, or you pick the word, the single most loved area within the most loved sector, technology, semis are now, of course, the opposite side of all that love. Something's not right. The charts are not good, and I would continue to reduce exposure. I mean, if you are a believer that there is a recession or a slowdown in the offing, you cannot be invested in semiconductors. No semiconductors historically have worked. You can't be invested in growth stocks, period. And that's part of the story. And the market right now is not priced for recession, let's be clear. What Carter's talking about in terms of that relative underperformance going all the way from July, and NVIDIA really has been at least the leader of the pack, at least in that group.

8:50And it's funny because I actually think AMD is interesting on valuation. I don't know when that will really matter. But this is a company that I don't think has pegged their future all to AI. In fact, it's really. Question for you. Yes. How much time does Lisa Sue have? I mean, think about this. If you missed a whole cycle. The clock is ticking. If you missed a whole cycle and they've been telling a story about the AI TAM and that they've been talking about a chip that they have. And some reviews have said that it's actually performed well against the H100. This thing can't get out of its own way.

9:17And the only reason I say that is what did we just see from Intel? You've been talking about it all week. It's had the biggest, you know, three-day gain since 1987. I'm not saying that that company is out of the woods by any means, but here's a company that was neck and neck with NVIDIA for two decades, right? And they have just fallen by the wayside. That's Intel, obviously, and AMD. Yeah, well, I think the AMD story, though, really is more about how they've eaten Intel's lunch than it is that they've lagged NVIDIA. And I think it's been apples and oranges for a while. And as I like to say, you make the most money when things go from terrible to just bad.

9:48That's what's going on in Intel right now. It's nothing to do cartwheels, and you're not doing them. I hear you. I think it's a case where AMD has proven that there's a lot left to do. And what was once looking like a one and a half horse race with AMD being the half, it's a one horse race. And that's good for Nvidia. Or is it? Have we? Oh, we got breaking news. Oh, breaking news. Breaking news on the FTC. Megan Cassell's got the details. Megan. Melissa, we are just learning, and I can cite this to a White House official and a second source, that President Donald Trump has fired both Democratic commissioners on the FTC.

10:20That means that just two commissioners, two Republican commissioners, are operating on the FTC at this point. We have no further details at this point, but the two Democratic commissioners, that's Rebecca Slaughter, who was appointed during President Trump's first term in 2018, and Alvaro Bedoya, who was appointed during President Biden's term in 2021, both of them are now out of a job. We will continue to watch this, and we expect more background and more statements to come in shortly. For now, we know Trump has fired both of those officials, leaving just two commissioners, Melissa. left on the FTC at the moment.

10:53How many are typically on the FTC? Is it five? It's five total. No more than three can be from the same party. So they do need a majority. Republicans will now, of course, have the majority, given that they have the majority of the seats. It's unclear to me in this moment, having just learned this, what this means for the FTC functioning. But a third commissioner did just make it through committee on the Hill. I believe it was last week. So more coming on the Republican side. We'll see what will have to happen next for the Democrats. All right. Megan, thank you. Megan Casella, we've been talking about about, you know, the golden age for M &A under the Trump administration for so long.

11:29It looked like the agendas of Biden and Trump sort of looked almost converging at some point. But here it is a major shakeup. Major shakeup. But, you know, again, is the convergence might have to have a bit of a divergence here. But I think a lot of people were betting on a robust M &A environment under this new administration. We talked about seemingly, you know, they were meeting somewhere in the middle, maybe this pushes it a little bit out. So maybe on the margins, this is a good thing for the banks. Remains to be seen. And I don't know what that concert was in the back. That was awful. That was a protest, I think.

11:58Well, it sounded like someone wasn't happy about losing their job. But, you know, you've got a dynamic here where I think it's interesting because the agenda of the Trump administration, in some cases, is going to be very protectionist. And there's dynamics here where in terms of M &A and some deal flow that I think is going to be challenging. So this isn't a reason to sell banks, by the way. I mean, this whole thing that banks were rallying on an M &A environment, I think, is crazy. I think they were rallying on a steeper yield curve, deregulation, valuations that make sense, capital give back.

12:29And I think that's more the issue. But, yes, this is fascinating. Let's see where it goes. Yeah, I can't imagine it's a huge surprise, but it does come a day after or the day of one of the biggest tech mergers in a long time, or M &A, that is, with Google buying this company, Whiz. And so when you think about this deal happened right now, it didn't happen back in the summer. and there could be a whole host of other reasons. But we did see deal activity really slow down, especially as it relates to these mega cap tech stocks until they got better clarity with the new administration and what their posture was going to be.

12:58But to Tim's point, we really didn't see a whole heck of a lot of different messaging once the new administration came in. Yeah, we'll see how this shapes up. I should note that apparently the president has power to remove any FTC commissioner, but only for inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office. So I'm sure that there will be some protests or, you know. Open to interpretation, by the way. I mean, those things are not. That's true. It's very subjective. Well, I suspect those protesters had about 100 other things to be protesting. I don't think they jumped right out there because the FTC commissioners were fired.

13:30Interesting language, though, you just said quickly. I mean, in terms of the Fed and Fed, you know, chairs, that's the same type of language. That's right. Sort of subjective. So, you know, maybe that's a precursor. But we know who the new Fed chair is going to be. I think it's worse. I mean, there's no question to me that here's a guy that despite and I think if you're looking for independence out of the central bank, I mean, his history tells you that's what you get. It's not if you're looking for it. You better have it. That's what makes this country one of the things that makes it great. Which quickly is one of the reasons why he might not be because he is so independent.

14:04I mean, maybe it'd be somebody. Anyway, we're off on. All right. Let's get back to NVIDIA right now with Bernstein Research's Stacey Rasgan. He's on the ground at NVIDIA's conference. Stacey, great to have you with us. We were talking about NVIDIA and how this is not necessarily the audience for me. Jensen had a lot of technical things to talk about. But in terms of answering the burning question of investors, and that is, is the CapEx spend picture in place? Is that steady? Is it rock solid? Did you get anything from what he said today to answer that? Well, I mean, at this point, I don't think that we're seeing any signs that it's at risk.

14:44If anything, you know, he gave us a view of the roadmap going forward for the next several years and the performance improvement and the total cost of ownership improvement for the future platforms as you go from Blackwell to Blackwell Ultra to Rubin to Rubin Ultra. You even talked about Feynman in 2028. We're talking another, I think, more than an order of magnitude improvement in performance and total cost of ownership in the next couple of years, it is going to be a very NPV positive thing for customers to upgrade. So I don't think we heard anything that Jensen said that would suggest that CapEx budgets are getting ready to roll over.

15:22And again, who knows? We'll see when we get there. But at this point, I thought it sounded great. I thought he did a great job. Yeah, there's still skepticism, though. That's the thing with investors. If you are a believer that there is a growth scare, that there is a recession on the horizon. Can you be bullish, NVIDIA? I mean, I don't think that's an NVIDIA question, right? That's an everybody question. If we're going into a recession, I mean, semis in general tend not to do well in recessions. Again, there are some secular drivers here. I think they can hope to offset some of that. Clearly, the AI spending is happening.

16:01There are business models, cost reductions, revenue models that are starting to get dope on this stuff. There's this whole long-term trend that he talks about as you move from more traditional computing to accelerated computing, which is a massive cost saver. So there are other drivers, again, in a recession, you want to save costs and dial back. And these are investments I think that can pay off. But, I mean, if we go into a significant global or local recession, I don't think anything in semis does all that well. At least NVIDIA does have some of these structural drivers. And I've said this on the program before, but it's not even expensive.

16:34You know, it's like in the low 20s if the current numbers are, low 20s price support earnings, if the current numbers are near or close to being correct. And there's a lot of other things out there that are much more expensive that I think are likely to get hit just as bad or worse from a fundamental standpoint in a recessionary environment. Yeah, so price to earnings, you're right. But, you know, Dan just mentioned the competition coming, and obviously we saw a deceleration. Well, I mean, you probably were listening to some of the things that Dan said. I mean, we heard from Alibaba. We heard a month and a half ago about the deep-seek things.

17:02I mean, clearly people are going down that road. Whether or not they can catch up remains to be seen, but they will compete on price. So I guess my question is, how concerned should we be about potential margin deterioration from here? Again, I don't think it's about price. The price of the chip is only one component of the purchase issues. What really matters is total cost of ownership. So that's the price of the chip and the power and the cooling and everything else that goes into it over the lifetime of that chip's lifetime. based on what kind of performance you can get out of it over that time frame.

17:36And I think NVIDIA, I mean, even today, I mean, you can see where the dollars are flowing. They have the lowest TCO. And if you look at, again, the roadmap and the improvement trajectory that they laid out today, I think it's going to be hard-pressed for many of their or any of their competitors really to have a significantly better TCO. And that even ignores the fact that everything else that they're doing around software, around systems, hardware, ecosystems. Are they talking about co-packaged optics now that they're bringing into place? Networking. They're the only ones out there with a full stack hardware and software solution.

18:09Like nobody else has that. Like I'm not terribly worried about their ability to compete. Stacey, you know, it's interesting. You just said what competition with a big question mark, maybe two question marks after that. And, you know, when I look at the analysts, there's 76 that cover it. 70 have an outperform or buy on it. The average price target is$172. The stock's trading at 115. It's down 25 % from its all-time highs. So there's a disconnect between what investors think and what Wall Street analysts think. And then when I hear Wall Street analysts be really skeptical about any competition, we've all been doing this a long time.

18:42That competition comes from the place that you don't expect it. So I really want to focus on the disconnect between what investors see in selling it versus what the analyst community thinks. Sure. So first of all, it's not just NVIDIA. Like, there's been a broader degrossing. It's not just NVIDIA that's come down. I do think that, again, there was some nervousness. There was the whole DeepSeek thing, which, by the way, I think the only thing we've seen some DeepSeek was with infrastructure spending going up, not down. And my view on DeepSeek, again, we may have talked about this. I thought DeepSeek was actually good news, not bad news, but it is what it is.

19:13You know, you can look at where the competition is driving. There's other merchant suppliers. You have AMD, and I guess maybe Intel's still in there. And, again, I don't think AMD, I mean, I even questioned the need, frankly. I mean, in terms of second source, I really do think it's going to be the hyperscalers doing their own chips. These are ASICs, and Google does TPUs and everything. I think it's the wrong time to worry about it. I think the right question to ask right now is not who's winning or losing between, like, GPUs and ASICs. Is the opportunity in front of it still big or is it not?

19:45Because if it's still big, then they could both thrive. If it's not, they're both screwed, right? So I think you have to believe that we're not on the saturated part of the S-curve. I don't think we are. My guess is the market, I think I said it as well, it's NVIDIA's game to lose. Like, I think we'll stop at this point. They're not showing any signs right now that they're losing. Stacey, great to see you. Thank you for phoning it. Appreciate it. You fought his corner. I like that. Stacey Raskin. Came out of his corner. No. Fought in the middle of the ring. Anyway. Compelling. Our own Jim Cramer is speaking with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang live from this GTC conference tomorrow.

20:20That's at 1015 Eastern on Squawk on the Street with more on Mad Money. Meantime, the last MAG7 name holding onto gains this year has given up the ghost, meta falling nearly 4 % for its lowest close since November. It is now down about half a percent in 2025, officially in bear market territory. Alphabet, meantime, hitting its worst levels in more than six months as investors digest its largest acquisition ever, buying cloud security startup Whiz for$32 billion. That's$9 billion more than it originally was going to pay for it last summer when talks fell through. Alphabet shares now down more than 16 percent this year.

20:56What does this mean, Carter, when the last titans fall? Well, I mean, the real question is just because they've joined in or succumbed doesn't mean it necessarily is over for the team or thesis that the market, which has been loved and rich and full, is not finished selling off. My hunch is that some of these are down to levels where it's right to make a small bet for a bounce. But I wouldn't read in on a sort of extremely bullish basis. Oh, my gosh, this is the buying opportunity of a lifetime. This is the kind of moment where after the amount of time and money that's been put into the market since the COVID low for caution.

21:40Carter, do you then follow what was the essentially the correlation trade on the way up? and therefore do you expect to see it into software, into security? These names are already pulled back, too. In fact, they're higher-bader names. But just help me understand from your perspective how you look at these charts and where one chart leads you to another. Yeah, so again, if you take the theme of what led the most, it gets us back to semis, right? And then there are certain software companies that haven't had any struggle whatsoever and that are close to 52-week highs. at a moment like this, I'm not sure I have the answer to your overarching question, but it's almost always right to respect relative strength.

22:20And so in a period where equities and tech in particular has been selling off week after week after week, something that has resisted that, it's not that it resisted it, it's that it did not attract sellers, that people have been selling a lot of things. But when they got around to that particular, and they said, no, I want to hold it. That's what relative strength in it means that there perhaps isn't a lot of selling to be had. Coming up, you've heard of gold surge this year, but another heavy metal is cranking its rally up to 11. How copper's run is turning heads, but first, ripple effects in the travel trade.

22:53Airlines facing headwinds and crew stocks hitting rough waters, and now it's coming for your wallet. The financial name's feeling the pain next. Don't go anywhere. Fast Money's back in two. Welcome back to Fast Money. More cracks in the travel trade emerging today. Allegiant Travel, the latest to deliver a warning, saying they're seeing weak demand, leisure demand specifically. That's sending shares of United, JetBlue, American Airlines and Delta falling as much as 3.5%. Cruise lines also getting battered. Royal Caribbean plunging more than 7 % today. Norwegian and Carnival also sharply lower.