Long-time technology analyst Fred Hickey said Tuesday that he was buying puts against Nvidia amid concerns that the artificial intelligence trade could be popping. In The High Tech Strategist newsletter, Hickey said he's begun seeing evidence of the AI trade unwinding. The analyst, who has seen many tech cycles come and go since starting his career in 1987, is part of a growing chorus of voices on Wall Street arguing that AI has now warped into a bubble that risks exploding. "I've been arguing for a long time that the AI datacenter buildout mania driven by egomaniacal billionaire CEOs with bad cases of FOMO would eventually come to collapse — as all periods of easy money-driven malinvestment do," Hickey wrote, referencing the "fear of missing out." Hickey likened the current situation to the fiber-optic networking bubble that began collapsing in 2000. However, this one is "much bigger," he said. The end of the AI trade could come sooner under Kevin Warsh, President Donald Trump's nominee to lead the Federal Reserve , who may focus on withdrawing excess liquidity that Hickey said has boosted the AI bubble. Concerns have arisen around AI stocks in the past month, Hickey said. Companies such as Oracle and Microsoft with high exposure to OpenAI, owner of the ChatGPT bot , have been especially hard hit. Oracle and Microsoft have slumped about 22% and 14%, respectively, in 2026. The S & P 500 , meanwhile, has added roughly 1%. The outlook worsened after a report that Nvidia's deal with OpenAI to invest as much as $100 billion was facing difficulties, Hickey said. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang shrugged off those claims in a Tuesday interview with CNBC, but Hickey said the executive's "damage control" hasn't convinced investors. Hickey said his largest put option position is against Nvidia, whose stock chart he said is "starting to look ugly." He questioned if the stock, which has fallen 5% in 2026, is forming a head-and-shoulders chart pattern. NVDA YTD mountain Nvidia, year-to-date The analyst said he holds smaller positions against Oracle, as well as Micron , Tesla and Apple . To be sure, Hickey said his total put option position is only about 1% of his entire portfolio. Conversely, Hickey brushed off the recent software stock rout that's been driven by investor fear that AI will suddenly make many software providers obsolete. Software names are on his potential buy list if technology stocks are hit by a wave of investor capitulation, as he expects. "I think that argument is mostly ... hogwash and as a result, I considered buying some of the stocks," Hickey wrote. "However, after looking at the valuations, I decided they were still too high (especially when stock-based compensation is accounted for)."
