One announcement tomorrow could have a big impact on your KiwiSaver

Wednesday, 20 May 2026

NVIDIA is currently worth around $9 trillion NZD - roughly double the GDP of New Zealand and Australia combined.

Finn Hogan is Stuff’s technology correspondent.

Valued at $9 trillion NZD, NVIDIA’s weight in passive index funds means any stock drop will heavily hit everyday global investors.

NVIDIA is a major player of the AI boom, projected to capture 75% of a massive $7.6 trillion USD global AI infrastructure spend.

Despite record-breaking growth, NVIDIA remains highly vulnerable to geopolitical risks due to its near-total reliance on a single Taiwanese manufacturer (TSMC) to physically produce its advanced chips.

ANALYSIS: It’s probably a stretch to say we are now in a situation where if NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang tripped on stage and faceplanted, it could cause a global recession.

But not much of a stretch.

The computer chip designer and most valuable company in history will report its quarterly earnings tomorrow morning at 9:00 am NZT. To say investors are watching closely is putting it mildly.

NVIDIA is currently worth around $9 trillion NZD - roughly double the GDP of New Zealand and Australia combined. Even a 5% drop in NVIDIA’s stock value would instantly wipe out a level of wealth far larger than what our entire government spends in a year.

And Kiwi experts warn that in our interconnected global economy, what happens in Silicon Valley doesn’t stay there.

“I don’t think most everyday investors have a clue how exposed they are… If NVIDIA has a shocker of a quarter, we’re all going to feel it,” explains financial advisor and host of the Everyday Investor podcast, Darcy Ungaro.

“This is largely due to the massive growth in passive index investing, which allocates money simply based on how large a company is. When you're dealing with a multi-trillion-dollar company like NVIDIA, they automatically suck up the lion's share of the S&P 500 index. A huge number of KiwiSaver fund managers use that index as their benchmark or allocate directly to it.”

Much of NVIDIA’s enormous value was created relatively recently, as it is the principal designer of the computer chips powering the AI revolution. Its stock price has climbed over 1,000% since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022.

Luckily for NVIDIA, analysts currently predict another storming quarter for the company, forecasting first-quarter revenue to come in at a record $78.50 billion USD—up almost 80% from last year.

But sky-high analyst expectations can be a double-edged sword, putting NVIDIA in the unfortunate position of being seen as a failure if they only deliver exceptional results instead of world-shaking, record-breaking ones.

And while the numbers themselves will speak volumes, it's the remarks Huang makes after which will be scrutinised the most closely. What forecasts is he making for future demand? Is he projecting confidence in the same meteoric growth for next year? When will the music stop and investors scramble to find a chair?

The pressure is so intense mainly because the fortunes of NVIDIA are now seen as a bellwether for the AI sector more generally, particularly for the so-called 'Magnificent Seven' tech stocks at its forefront: NVIDIA, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Tesla.

Investment bank Goldman Sachs estimates $7.6 trillion USD will be spent globally on AI over the next five years, just on hard costs like data centre infrastructure.

The majority of that cost in a given year will go toward what’s called 'compute' spend (i.e., chips), and 75% of that compute spend is projected to funnel directly to NVIDIA.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was spotted trying some of Beijing’s delicacies. He was seen at No. 69 Fangzhuanchang Noodles, tucking into a bowl of “zhajiangmian” — a Beijing specialty that features noodles covered in a thick soybean-paste sauce

It’s an amount of money that is hard to get your head around. For context, the United States spent around $300 billion USD ($514 billion NZD) in total, inflation-adjusted, on the Apollo programme to get humans to the moon.

So, if NVIDIA catches a cold tomorrow, the rest of the economy might get pneumonia.

“It’s not just one stock. A correction here hits the entire Magnificent Seven tech block that has been propping up global market returns for the last decade. It could trigger a wider unwind of tech stocks as a whole,” Ungaro says.

How did NVIDIA get this big?

NVIDIA has been at the forefront of three separate tech revolutions.

Originally a maker of specialised computer chips for video gaming called GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), NVIDIA helped power that sector as it grew into the $350 billion USD titan it is today—bigger than movies and music combined.

Then, people realised the same kind of GPUs that rendered hyper-realistic game worlds also helped solve the complicated math underpinning cryptocurrency transactions.

Then, to complete the hat trick, the same GPUs turned out to be precisely the kind needed to power the complex computations underpinning generative AI.

Basically, in three consecutive gold rushes, NVIDIA has been the one selling shovels.

Both governments and businesses worldwide are scrambling to build their own alternatives to NVIDIA’s chips, but that’s not as easy as it sounds.

A precarious position

NVIDIA is a designer of chips, but not a physical maker of them. Modern chips are some of the most complicated things humans have ever invented, meaning the supply chain has become highly specialised, with a few key players dominating production.

The most advanced ones—like those in your smartphone—are so small and delicate that their components are measured in nanometers. The cutting edge of chip manufacturing today sits at around 2 nanometers. To put that into perspective, a large atom is about 0.5 nanometers across.

NVIDIA relies almost entirely on Taiwan-based TSMC to produce its chips. And they aren’t alone: roughly 90% of the world's advanced chips come from a single TSMC factory (called a 'fab' in industry jargon) in Taiwan.

This makes any potential disruption to Taiwan potentially catastrophic for the modern tech economy. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Jensen Huang was invited on US President Donald Trump's recent visit to China alongside a slew of other tech CEOs.

“We already know how dangerous it is if a single shipping strait in the Middle East gets blocked for the flow of oil. For tech, all it takes is tension around the Taiwan Strait. If TSMC becomes inaccessible and can't get physical products to NVIDIA, we are in trouble,” says Ungaro.

The multi-trillion-dollar question ahead of NVIDIA’s earnings call tomorrow is essentially: when will the AI bubble burst? For experts here, it's only a matter of time.

“When a correction happens in this space—and I do say when, not if—it will likely be significant, on par with the dot-com or railway pullbacks,” says Ungaro.

“Initially, a lot of people will be deeply confused. They might blame outside events rather than the reality: that we got ahead of our skis and built out way too much infrastructure for the actual short-term demand. Everyday investors will be scratching their heads, wondering why their KiwiSaver portfolios are suddenly down 10%, 20%, or 30%.”

Whether its fortunes have peaked remains to be seen, but for now, the world continues to make enormous bets on AI. And NVIDIA holds all the chips.