As Nvidia (NVDA) continues to linger under the $100 per share mark, investors are still considering a key question: Is the artificial intelligence (AI) leader’s reign over?
Nvidia entered 2025 poised for even more growth as the AI market continued to boom. But when Chinese AI startup DeepSeek released a model trained on less-advanced chips, a massive selloff for chip stocks ensued, and NVDA is still fighting to recover.
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Months later, the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China continues to complicate matters for tech companies, raising even more questions for Nvidia and its peers. With shares down 18% for the past month, speculation is rising that Nvidia is losing its spot as the leader of the AI industry.
However, some experts aren’t so convinced that the red-hot market is shifting so quickly. One former big tech CEO recently revealed where he believes Nvidia is headed.
Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has revealed who he sees the most dominant AI company.
Image source: Annabelle Chih/Bloomberg via Getty Images
An industry veteran has blunt words on Nvidia’s growth prospects
When some CEOs are ousted from their positions at top companies, they walk away from the industry and turn their attention to other things. But Pat Gelsinger, who helped spearhead Intel’s (INTC) transition into the modern age of AI, has kept busy launching his own startup.
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Stepping away from the corporate world where he spent decades seems to have freed Gelsinger up to speak more openly about it. He recently appeared on the Opening Bid podcast, where he shared his thoughts on the AI revolution, chipmaking, and which company he sees as the industry’s leader.
To put it bluntly, Gelsinger believes that despite Nvidia’s recent struggles, the company maintains a sizeable lead over all its rivals, to the point that it will be extremely difficult for anyone to dethrone it, even as the threat of DeepSeek continues to persist.
“I’ve always viewed that there’s sort of this 10x rule, where if you’re not 10x better than the king, you’re not going to displace that,” he states. “Here you have to be at least sustainably 10x better, and then people will say, okay, yeah, I’m going to go invest in that.”
Gelsinger also gives Nvidia credit for building “meaningful moats” around its franchise, acknowledging that it has clearly given the company a competitive edge that other chipmakers simply haven’t been able to achieve.
While the AI market has become extremely competitive over the past few years, Gelsinger believes Nvidia executed well through it all and that its “run hard to stay in the front” strategy has paid off, despite Nvidia stock’s poor performance lately.
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Although he is unquestionably bullish on Nvidia’s growth prospects, Gelsinger did not offer context on when he believes the stock will start making up the ground it lost during Q1. However, according to Yahoo Finance, Wall Street analysts predict the company will post an increase of $5 per share this year.
Nvidia is still the king, according to Gelsinger
If there’s anyone qualified to talk about trying to dethrone Nvidia, it’s Gelsinger. During his tenure as CEO of Intel, he ambitiously promised the company would produce AI chips that could compete with those made by Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices.
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Unfortunately, this prediction did not pan out or even come close. Led by Gelsinger, Intel charged full force into the AI market, only to come up short and prove unable to rival industry leaders such as Nvidia and AMD.
By the time Intel’s board ousted Gelsinger in December 2023, the company had missed financial targets and had little progress to show on the AI front, despite the CEO’s promises. Intel stock had declined significantly but since then, it hasn’t made much progress and still struggles to trade above $20 per share.
Given his history of trying to compete with Nvidia, it makes sense that Gelsinger would have analyzed it significantly and concluded that dethroning it is unlikely for any current company.
While he has praised the DeepSeek R1 model that caused so much trouble for Nvidia, it is clear that Gelsinger sees the company as the future of AI.
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