Nvidia was edging down early on Tuesday. The chip maker was moving in sympathy with the wider semiconductor sector after comments by the head of rival Broadcom spooked the market and Microsoft unveiled its latest custom chips.

Nvidia shares were down 0.8% at $224.45 in premarket trading. The stock has dropped 5.4% in the past five trading sessions, after breaking through to new highs last week.

Nvidia was holding up better than many of its chip peers, which were falling after Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said at an event in Singapore on Monday that many artificial intelligence investors "have no clue what they are investing in," comparing them to gamblers in "a casino." Broadcom shares were down 1.1% in the premarket.

That doesn't mean Tan is calling for an end to the AI boom. But he did suggest spending could eventually be constrained by a lack of capital to support the trillions of dollars currently projected to be invested in data centers and other infrastructure.

As the biggest hardware vendor in the sector, Nvidia is always at the sharp end of any slowdown concerns. The particular worry for Nvidia is that some of its biggest customers will seek to reduce spending on its chips by using in-house processors. Microsoft on Monday unveiled its latest AI chip, dubbed Maia 300, which it said will be its primary system for inference -- the process of running AI models.

Microsoft expects Maia 300 to process 40% more tokens -- the measure of inputs and outputs in an AI query -- per each megawatt of power than leading systems based on graphics-processing units -- which are Nvidia's specialty.

The usual disclaimers apply. This isn't the end of Microsoft buying Nvidia chips, and Microsoft said it would continue to provide its cloud-computing customers with multiple silicon options. But every such announcement makes it more important that Nvidia's bet on fueling a wider ecosystem of smaller AI companies -- which won't build their own chips and will keep buying its hardware -- pays off.