Nvidia hits a record high, market valuation tops $3.4 trillion

Nvidia’s stock closed at a record on Monday as Wall Street prepare for earnings season and updates from the chipmaker’s largest customers on their expected investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Nvidia is the second most valuable publicly traded company, with a market valuation of $3.4 trillion, behind Apple worth $3.55 trillion.

The stock ended the day at $138.07, up 2.4% from its June 18 peak of $135.58. Since the beginning of 2023, the shares have risen more than nine times, and up almost 180% for the year.

Nvidia, often regarded as the company providing the picks and shovels for the AI gold rush, has benefited the most from the generative AI boom, which started with the public release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022. Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, create and implement complex AI models that enable ChatGPT and related apps.

Companies like Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Amazon are purchasing Nvidia GPUs in masse to build ever-larger computer clusters for their state-of-the-art AI research. All of those companies are anticipated to publish their quarterly results before the end of October.

Nvidia’s 95% of the market for AI training and inference chips, is receiving a disproportionate share of the billions of dollars that the leading tech companies spend each year on their AI buildouts.

Nvidia’s revenue has more than doubled over the last five quarters, in three quarters, it has at least tripled. According to LSEG, economists predict growth of roughly 82% to $32.9 billion in the quarter ending in October, though likely to slow the remainder of the year moderately.

Nvidia said the demand for its Blackwell next-generation AI GPU was “insane,” the company anticipates making billions of dollars from the new product in the fourth quarter.