That achievement came just one month after surpassing both Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) in market cap as members of the $3 trillion market cap club. In September, the company announced plans to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI. As a result, Evercore raised its price target on NVIDIA to $225 from $214 while keeping an "Outperform" rating, citing the OpenAI deal as the impetus, while Barclays raised its price target to $240 from $200, maintaining its "Overweight" rating.
First, Lucid will roll out a more advanced version of its partially automated driving assist for the Gravity SUV, which it says has been "turbocharged by Nvidia Drive AV." But after that, the plan is for a so-called "level 4" autonomous system, capable of driving itself from point to point without human intervention, at least within a geofence or other limited operational design domain.
Dow futures are up another 68 points to 47,963 and Nasdaq futures are up 123 points to 26,284. And all could easily push even higher, as markets wait for the Federal Reserve's decision later today. "Markets are assigning a nearly 100% probability that the Federal Open Market Committee will approve a second consecutive quarter percentage point, or 25 basis point, reduction in the federal funds rate. The overnight lending benchmark is currently targeted between 4%-4.25%," says CNBC.
The broad index of large-cap companies in the S&P 500 closed flat, but the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 rose 0.55%. Tech stocks were led by Nvidia, which was up 3%, and now has a market cap of more than $5 trillion. (Its stock is down 0.7% premarket this morning, suggesting that some traders are taking their overnight gains.) To put that in perspective, Nvidia's market cap is bigger than the GDP of every G7 country except the U.S. and Japan.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has gone from a little-known tech executive to a globally famous AI superstar very, very fast - and one photo from his trip to South Korea this week shows it. During the trip - which coincides with President Donald Trump's meeting with China's leader, Xi Jinping - Huang did what many businesspeople do on trips and met some contacts for dinner.
Semiconductor giant Nvidia is looking to invest at least $500 million, and up to $1 billion, in Poolside, which builds AI models for software development, according to reporting from Bloomberg, which cited sources. This investment would be part of a $2 billion funding round Poolside is raising at a $12 billion valuation, according to Bloomberg. Nvidia's investment could rise to $1 billion if the company successfully completes the rest of the funding round, Bloomberg reported.
Days later, OpenAI struck a similar multibillion-dollar arrangement with AMD. Celebrated by investors, these deals also raised eyebrows. To some observers, they looked eerily like the circular financing arrangements of the late 1990s, when vendors and clients reinforced each other's valuations without generating real value. Bloomberg aptly described the pattern as an "increasingly complex and interconnected web of business transactions" fueling a trillion-dollar AI boom.
HSBC also raised the price target on the stock to a Street-high of $320, up from $200. The new target implies upside of nearly 80% from Nvidia's last close of $180.03. Hitting that target would translate to a market capitalization close to $8 trillion, compared with about $4.37 trillion currently. We expect AI GPU TAM to keep increasing beyond hyperscalers, leading to continuous earnings growth, analyst Frank Lee wrote, referring to the total addressable market for the processing chips.
On Tuesday, Nvidia announced it will begin taking orders for the DGX Spark, a $4,000 desktop AI computer that wraps one petaflop of computing performance and 128GB of unified memory into a form factor small enough to sit on a desk. Its biggest selling point is likely its large integrated memory that can run larger AI models than consumer GPUs.
Jensen Huang said Nvidia will keep sponsoring H-1B employees, but Trump's new $100,000 fee means the company may have to shell out millions more to keep doing so. Nvidia would have to pay an estimated $147.3 million if President Donald Trump's newest fee applied to the H-1B visaholders the company got approved in 2025, according to a calculation based on data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The new $100,000 fee applies only to new H-1B visa applicants and not to those renewing their visas or current visaholders.