Ark Adds to Nvidia, Block and Nu Holdings as Chip Rivals and China Workarounds Test the AI Leader

Ark Invest added to positions in NVDA, XYZ and NU, with Cathie Wood arguing Nvidia remains reasonably valued even at a roughly $5.4 trillion market capitalization given its revenue trajectory. The same commentary framed Block as trading well below its 2021 peak and Nu Holdings as the cheapest of the three on forward earnings at about 13 times .

Against that, commentary circulating the same day pointed to a new AI chip startup founded by Harvard dropouts as a credible competitive threat, on the argument that inference-specialized silicon can undercut general-purpose GPUs on cost per token for fixed workloads. The claim is worth tracking rather than acting on: no challenger has yet demonstrated the software ecosystem that makes Nvidia's position durable, and CUDA lock-in has outlasted several prior waves of specialized-silicon entrants.

On the supply side, SK hynix extended its high-bandwidth memory partnership with Nvidia, reinforcing how much of the AI accelerator bottleneck now sits in memory rather than logic. The geopolitical wrinkle is that Chinese AI firms are reportedly accessing restricted Nvidia chips through offshore cloud services, a loophole that leaves the compute available to Chinese developers while the revenue and the reported market share land outside China.

Taken together the picture is a leader that is still compounding but is being probed from three directions at once: valuation, architecture, and export policy. What would actually change the thesis is a hyperscaler shifting meaningful inference volume to non-Nvidia silicon, an HBM supply agreement that loosens Nvidia's allocation advantage, or an explicit regulatory move to close the cloud loophole. None of those has happened yet.

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