Nvidia's Cosmos 3 and Dividend Hike Meet Burry's Skepticism as Stock Hovers Near Highs

Nvidia unveils Cosmos 3 for physical AI, raises dividend tenfold, and approves $80B buyback, while short-seller Michael Burry places a bearish bet on the chipmaker.

Nvidia is pushing deeper into physical artificial intelligence with the launch of its Cosmos 3 model, while simultaneously rewarding shareholders with a tenfold dividend increase — yet prominent short-seller Michael Burry has placed a bet against the chipmaker. The conflicting signals come as the stock trades close to record levels, supported by blockbuster quarterly numbers and a dominant position in the AI accelerator market.

Cosmos 3: A Unified Model for Robotics and Autonomous Driving

Unveiled at the GTC Taipei conference on June 1, Cosmos 3 marks Nvidia’s first open omnimodel for physical AI. The architecture fuses image recognition, world generation, and action prediction into a single system, trained on 20 billion tokens of multimodal data — nearly one billion images and 400 million videos. The practical payoff is significant: training and evaluation cycles for physical AI applications can shrink from months to days, and the model can simulate rare or dangerous scenarios such as robot collisions or unusual traffic conditions without requiring real-world recordings.

To accelerate adoption, Nvidia has formed the Cosmos Coalition, bringing together AI labs and robotics firms including Agile Robots, Runway, and Skild AI. Members contribute proprietary models and research while tapping into Nvidia’s DGX cloud infrastructure for training. On the application side, Doosan Robotics, LG Electronics, and Samsung are using the Cosmos platform for robotics, while Li Auto is applying it to autonomous driving.

Research Reach and Dividend Firepower

Nvidia’s technology also dominated the CVPR conference in Denver, appearing in the majority of accepted papers for CVPR 2026. Research institutions from Carnegie Mellon University to Tsinghua University rely on Nvidia’s GPUs, simulation frameworks, and CUDA libraries. Two notable results emerged: GraspGen-X, the first foundation model for zero-shot grasping trained on billions of simulated grips, and LCDrive, which replaces text-based reasoning with compact latent representations for faster embedded response times in autonomous vehicles. The Nvidia Physical AI Dataset has surpassed 15 million downloads on Hugging Face.

Separately, the stock traded ex-dividend on Thursday after Nvidia raised its quarterly payout from $0.01 to $0.25 per share, payable on June 26, 2026. The board also approved an $80 billion share buyback program. These capital moves are backed by a record first quarter for fiscal 2027: revenue of $81.62 billion, up 85% year over year, with operating cash flow of $50.3 billion and earnings per share of $1.87. Nvidia expects global AI hyperscalers to invest a combined $1 trillion in infrastructure by 2027.

Huang’s Taipei Pitch vs. Burry’s Wager

Speaking at an exclusive Taipei event attended by more than 300 guests, including representatives of Hillhouse Investment and other family offices, CEO Jensen Huang dismissed doubts about the long-term profitability of AI. He described the returns on capital from AI investments as “insanely profitable,” pointing to trillions of dollars in value already created. Demand for the Blackwell chip generation remains insatiable, he said, calling for more investment in land, energy, and financing solutions to support further AI infrastructure growth.

Goldman Sachs analyst James Schneider reaffirmed his buy rating and $285 price target after Huang’s Computex keynote, noting Nvidia’s widening lead in data-center performance and cost leadership, and that the Vera-Rubin platform ramp remains on track.

But Michael Burry has taken a contrarian stance. The investor famed for betting against the 2008 housing market is said to have built a short position of over one million shares. His primary criticism targets the quality of certain deals: he labeled the $5.4 billion transaction with xAI for GB200 GPUs a “Fugazi.” Burry also flagged a structural risk — three large customers account for more than 60% of outstanding receivables, and some of those clients are developing their own chip solutions, which could erode Nvidia’s dependency advantage over time.

Market Performance Amid Sector Headwinds

Despite the bearish undercurrent, Nvidia’s stock gained 2.80% on Thursday to close at €190.38, reflecting resilience in a tough semiconductor environment. Rival Broadcom suffered double-digit declines after disappointing earnings. Nvidia commands roughly 86% of the AI accelerator market, and its shares are trading about 18% above the 200-day moving average, having risen nearly 18% year to date. The stock remains roughly 6% below its all-time high from May, though it stands at €188.28 in the most recent session, still up about 17% since the start of the year and about 7% shy of the €202.50 52-week peak.