(fxcue news) - Nvidia Corp. shares were losing nearly 3% in the pre-market trading on the Nasdaq, continuing the 10 percent drop on Tuesday's regular trading as well as around 2.4% in the extended trading, following reports of the artificial intelligence or AI chipmaker receiving subpoenas from the U.S. Department of Justice as part of an antitrust probe. In June, after launching its next generation of AI chips amid the surging competition and significant growth in demand worldwide, Nvidia had breached the $3 trillion mark in valuation, and overtook Apple Inc. as the second most valuable company initially, and later tech major Microsoft Corp. to become the most valuable company. With the current plunge in stock price, the company's valuation has reached $2.649 trillion, behind Apple's $3.387 trillion and Microsoft's $3.043 trillion. Bloomberg reported, citing sources familiar with the matter, that the subpoenas were sent to NVIDIA and other companies while seeking evidence that the chipmaker violated antitrust laws, marking an escalation in its investigation into the dominant provider of AI processors. The news comes as Nvidia is scheduled to appear at an investor event on September 11. Nvidia shares were hit badly last week after the chipmaker issued lower third-quarter margin view sequentially, and maintained its fiscal 2025 margin forecast. This was despite reporting significantly higher profit in its second quarter with more-than doubled revenues, and also announcing a hefty $50 billion share repurchase authorization, without expiration. The company had then reported a 122.4 percent jump in its second-quarter revenues on the strength of AI chip demand. Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, then said, "Hopper demand remains strong, and the anticipation for Blackwell is incredible. NVIDIA achieved record revenues as global data centers are in full throttle to modernize the entire computing stack with accelerated computing and generative AI." On the Nasdaq, NVDA closed Tuesday's regular trading at $108.00, down $11.37 or 9.53 percent. In the after-hours trading, the stock further dropped $2.60 or 2.41 percent. In the pre-market activity on Wednesday, the shares were trading at $105.13, down 2.66 percent.