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The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) faced a messy session on Tuesday, exploring early upside and challenging the 47,600 level before getting knocked back down once again. New-old players in the AI space are cropping up to challenge the long-running Nvidia (NVDA) hegemony in the hardware space, prompting a back-and-forth in major tech names heading into the midweek.

The Dow Jones and the Standard & Poor’s 500 (SP500) indexes are grappling to hold onto intraday gains, with the Dow climbing around 220 points or 0.48%, and the SP500 rising a scant 25 points, or 0.37%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 climbed 180 points, or 0.76%, to cross 23,450 as the AI and crypto segments recover their footing.

Crypto rebound looks to grow some legs

Bitcoin (BTC) rebounded around 6.5%, clawing back recent losses as crypto traders pile back into what many speculators hope is the bottom of the crypto plunge that dragged BTC/USD prices down over 36% from all-time highs set in October. 

AI hardware race continues to heat up, maybe?

The AI hardware race continues to heat up, and long-time AI champion Nvidia declined from Tuesday’s meager highs after Amazon (AMZN) announced a rushed launch of its own AI-focused chipsets, tailor-made to compete with Nvidia’s AI-servicing GPUs. Amazon rose 1.2% on the headlines before it too fell back toward the previous day’s close, slipping back below $236 per share in the process. 

According to Amazon, their new 'Trainium3' chipsets will be able to handle demanding calculation loads necessary to train and run AI models. However, a key sticking point that is preventing Amazon stock from running hot: According to the company, its AI-focused chipsets lack extensive function libraries that are bespoke to Nvidia hardware, meaning any cost savings in operating will likely be expended in setup and additional training time, making a transition from pre-existing Nvidia hardware a lateral move.

Political jitters continue to roil just beneath the surface

Never ones to sit idly by and let an equity recovery run unimpeded, the Trump administration is hard at work pumping out eyebrow-raising statements that are raising political jitters among market participants. US President Donald Trump reiterated his frequent promises that the federal government would be handing out supplementary payments to Americans from tariff income. By all accounts, tariff inflows have drastically underperformed expectations from the Trump administration itself, and are overwhelmingly being paid for by US companies and citizens to begin with.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is working double-duty to walk back Trump’s own “tariff repayment” proposals, highlighting the dysfunction underscoring the Trump administration. According to Bessent, “tariff repayments” are likely to take the form of steep tax rebates, which the Treasury Secretary could be coming as soon as Q1 2026.

Dow Jones daily chart

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