Key Highlights

● Nvidia closed at $212.21 on October 22 and lost about $235 billion in value.

● Huang said neocloud demand is off the charts but capital is scarce.

● Huang said Nvidia is trying to establish its compute as a financeable asset.

● CoreWeave closed at $55.60, a 17-month low.

Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) shares fell on Thursday, October 22, 2026, closing at $212.21, after chief executive Jensen Huang's comments about financing AI infrastructure became one of the most debated topics of the day. Nvidia was one of the biggest drags on the S&P 500, according to market reports, and a heavy weight on the Nasdaq-100.

Nvidia alone lost about $235 billion in market value on the day. The company is now down more than $600 billion from its early-October peak.

What Huang said

Huang spoke on the sidelines of Nvidia's GTC event in Berlin, where the company unveiled its DSX POD system. He was upbeat about demand from neoclouds, the newer cloud companies that rent out Nvidia-powered computing.

"If you look at the fundamentals, the demand for the neoclouds is off the charts," he said.

But he also said that scarce working capital is holding those customers back. "The demand of the capital is much greater than the availability of the capital," Huang said.

His proposed answer was to make Nvidia's hardware easier to borrow against. "One of the things that we're trying to do is to establish Nvidia's compute as a financeable asset," he said. In principle, that could let lenders treat the chips more like other equipment that can back a loan.

On China, Huang said: "No market is closed forever."

Why the market flinched

Huang's comments landed on an already nervous day. Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) had just reported a 2026 capital spending range of $135 billion to $145 billion and negative free cash flow, which marked its first cash outflow in more than a decade. Lam Research (NASDAQ:LRCX) guided below what many investors had hoped for and warned of supply constraints into 2027.

Against that backdrop, Huang's acknowledgement that capital, not demand, is the bottleneck reinforced fears about how the AI build-out will be funded. Wells Fargo traders said his comments spooked markets.

The worry hit neoclouds directly. CoreWeave (NASDAQ:CRWV) closed at $55.60, a 17-month low. Bernstein kept an Underperform rating and cut its target to $51 from $74, estimating CoreWeave needs about $85 billion to fund its committed backlog. BofA kept a Buy rating but said it likely needs to raise $20 billion.

A brutal day for chips

The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index had its biggest one-day drop since June 23, according to market data. The Nasdaq Composite fell 694.00 points to 26,008.86, its steepest decline since June 5, and the Nasdaq-100 shed about $1.32 trillion in value, with 26 AI and chip names accounting for the bulk of the net loss.

Nvidia was also among the weakest performers in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which still edged up 11.89 points to 52,867.98 as investors rotated into consumer staples, health care and homebuilders.

Nvidia Must Show Lenders Will Back Its Compute

Investors will want details on how Nvidia plans to turn its compute into a "financeable asset" and whether lenders embrace the idea. The October 28 results from Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL), followed by Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) on October 29, will show whether major buyers of AI chips are holding their spending plans. The Federal Reserve's decision on October 28 could also affect the cost of capital that Huang identified as the key constraint.