Nvidia Corp. shares are back on track to try to turn in their best year ever after closing at a record high Tuesday, as the company reached a $1.2 trillion market capitalization for the first time.
Nvidia
NVDA,
shares rallied as much as 5% on Tuesday to an intraday high of $490.81, and closed up 4.2% at $487.84, while the S&P 500 index
SPX,
gained 1.5%. Last week, shares surpassed the $500 mark for the first time.
After an initial show of strength, Nvidia walked back gains following its blowout earnings report last week, when the graphics-processing-units maker topped Wall Street’s data-center sales estimates by more than $2 billion for the quarter, and forecast revenue for the current quarter of more than $3 billion above expectations.
Nvidia also closed above a $1.2 trillion market cap for the first time Tuesday, according to Dow Jones Market data.
In a little more than a year, Nvidia’s market capitalization had increased by close to $1 trillion, adding $925 billion in market cap since 2022’s stock price low, hit on Oct. 14, when shares closed below $113 for the first time since August 2020, according to Dow Jones data.
Last fall, Nvidia’s stock was melting down because it had to replace some $400 million in expected data-center sales to China with equipment that would clear a U.S. ban on AI tech as well as deal with inventory write-downs.
Read from Sept. 2022: Nvidia’s ‘China Syndrome’: Is the stock melting down?
Nvidia shares are up 234% year to date, compared with a 17% gain by the S&P 500, and already ahead of their strong 2016 gain of 224%, and back in the running to overcome their best one-year gain of 308% set back in 2001, according to FactSet data.
Nvidia shares were also the second-most active on the S&P 500 on Tuesday, with more than 69 million shares exchanged, second only to Tesla Inc.’s
TSLA,
more than 132 million shares exchanged by the close.
For their part, Tesla shares posted a 7.8% gain Tuesday, their biggest one-day jump in five months, following a report that Tesla was launching a $300 million AI computing cluster using thousands of Nvidia GPUs.
Also on Tuesday, Nvidia and Alphabet Inc.
GOOG,
GOOGL,
announced that the chip maker’s cutting-edge data-center chips are powering Google Cloud Platform and its PaxML large language model.
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