Nvidia crosses $4 trillion market cap as investors double down on AI chips

Nvidia shares closed at a record $208.27 on Friday, April 24, pushing the company’s market value above $5 trillion for the first time. (cnbc.com) The stock rose 4.3% that day, and CNBC reported investors were buying chip stocks ahead of earnings from the biggest cloud companies the following week. Intel shares jumped 24% on the same day, while Advanced Micro Devices rose 14% and Qualcomm climbed 11%. (cnbc.com) Nvidia’s business is still dominated by the hardware inside AI data centers. The company said fourth-quarter data-center revenue reached $62.3 billion, up 75% from a year earlier, while full-year revenue rose 65% to $215.9 billion. (nvidianews.nvidia.com) Those chips are the processors used to train and run large AI models. Nvidia said its Grace Blackwell systems are now geared toward “inference,” the step where trained models generate answers for users at scale. (nvidianews.nvidia.com) The market is treating that demand as durable because Nvidia’s biggest customers are still spending heavily. CNBC said Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon rely on Nvidia graphics processing units, and investors were waiting for their results as a readout on AI infrastructure budgets. (cnbc.com) Nvidia’s rise has also widened the gap between it and other megacaps. CNBC reported the company is up more than 14-fold since the end of 2022, a run tied to demand for artificial intelligence services and models. (cnbc.com) Competition is still building around that franchise. CNBC reported Alphabet has announced new chips intended to compete with Nvidia’s offerings when they become available to cloud customers later this year. (cnbc.com) For now, investors are still paying for Nvidia as the main supplier of the AI buildout. The latest quarter showed a company with $68.1 billion in total revenue, 75% gross margin, and a data-center business that remains the center of the trade. (nvidianews.nvidia.com)