Copper Hits All-Time High and $NVDA's Market Share Is Slipping

While everyone was refreshing their brokerage apps watching oil prices spike on the Hormuz drama, two quieter stories were doing heavy lifting on social this week: $NVDA getting its AI crown slowly pried off, and copper going absolutely feral on the London Metal Exchange.

Start with Nvidia, because the YouTube finance world cannot stop talking about it. The Economist dropped two separate videos on Jensen Huang this week, and the picture they paint is more nuanced than the perma-bull crowd wants to admit. Yes, revenue is approaching $100 billion per quarter and the stock has risen 14x since ChatGPT launched. Those are real numbers, not hype. But here is the part that matters: Nvidia's AI chip market share has dropped from roughly 80% to 60%, with custom silicon from hyperscalers now making up 40% of the market and projected to hit 50% by end of decade. That is a slow bleed, not a cliff, but it is real. Seeking Alpha's coverage adds another wrinkle: the key thing to watch in Nvidia's next earnings call is whether demand actually continues to outstrip supply, because the moment that gap closes, the valuation math gets a lot harder to justify.

On X, the sentiment split on $NVDA is classic bubble-era behavior. Bulls point to data center expansion and the 170% surge in data center revenue as proof Jensen has years of runway. Bears keep circling the circular financing play: Nvidia guaranteeing data center leases and investing $30 billion into OpenAI while OpenAI buys Nvidia chips. That kind of financial engineering is either genius or a warning sign, depending on your risk tolerance.

Now for the quieter scream: copper. Bloomberg's podcast coverage flagged copper hitting its all-time high on the London Metal Exchange this week, driven by anticipated U.S. tariffs on refined metal imports and a long-term supply crunch tied to data centers, renewables, and power grid buildout. Here is the thing nobody says out loud enough: you cannot build the AI future without copper. Every data center, every EV charger, every solar installation runs on it. If you believe in the AI trade but think Nvidia's market share story is getting messy, copper is the cleaner, less crowded expression of the same thesis.

The two tickers most directly exposed to copper's run on U.S. exchanges are $FCX (Freeport-McMoRan, the largest publicly traded copper producer) and $COPX via ETF exposure. YouTube sentiment on copper is notably more uniformly bullish than on Nvidia right now, which in itself is information worth sitting with.

Nvidia is still the AI king, but kings with shrinking kingdoms and complex balance sheet moves deserve a closer look before you add to the position. Copper, meanwhile, just quietly told you exactly where the AI buildout has to go next.