By Adam Clark

Nvidia stock was edging up early Wednesday. The future of the Stargate Project infrastructure plan and the potential expansion of Meta Platforms' in-house chip efforts are in focus for investors.

Nvidia shares were rising 0.2% to $133.05 in premarket trading. The stock fell 0.6% on Tuesday.

In the build up to the chip maker's earnings report on Feb 26., the focus is on big spending commitments for AI infrastructure.

Japan's SoftBank Group said Wednesday that the Stargate Project -- which aims to spend as much as $500 billion on AI infrastructure in the U.S. -- won't rely on SoftBank's equity for funding after it booked a $2.42 billion loss for the last quarter of 2024. That could relieve concerns over the Japanese group's volatile earnings posing an obstacle to Stargate.

Nvidia is a technology partner for the project, which aims to build new AI data centers in the U.S. SoftBank is a leading member of the consortium behind the project, alongside cloud-computing company Oracle and ChatGPT-developer OpenAI.

Meanwhile, Meta Platforms is in talks about potentially acquiring South Korean chip start-up FuriosaAI, according to Forbes, which cited people familiar with the matter. FuriosaAI's chips are specifically designed for inference, or producing output from AI models. The Korean company declined to comment on the report while Meta didn't immediately respond to a request for comment early Wednesday.

Meta said in its recent earnings report it was expanding the use of its in-house MTIA chips -- developed jointly with Broadcom -- into some areas where Nvidia's graphics-processing units have been used, such as AI training.

Among other chip makers, Advanced Micro Devices was rising 0.2% and Broadcom was gaining 0.1% in premarket trading.

Write to Adam Clark at adam.clark@barrons.com

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February 12, 2025 06:00 ET (11:00 GMT)

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