Nvidia (NVDA) closed at a record high on Friday, pushing its market capitalisation past $5 trillion for the first time since October 2025, as a powerful wave of investor enthusiasm for artificial intelligence hardware lifted semiconductor stocks across the board.
The stock gained 4.3% to close at $208.27, a record closing price, with the company now worth approximately $1 trillion more than the second-largest publicly traded company by market cap, Alphabet. The catalyst was Intel’s Thursday evening earnings report, which ignited broader confidence that the AI infrastructure buildout remains on a growth trajectory showing no signs of deceleration.
The Nasdaq closed the week up 15% for the month of April, putting it on course for its best monthly performance since April 2020. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index entered the weekend on an 18-session winning streak, a run that analysts are beginning to describe in historic terms. Nvidia’s resurgence in April is all the more notable given the company spent the first three months of the year down 6.4%, weighed down by geopolitical uncertainty around the US-Iran conflict, rising oil prices, and broader risk-off positioning. The rotation back into large-cap technology has been swift and decisive.
Nvidia’s position at the centre of the AI trade is structurally unchanged. Its GPU chips remain the primary compute substrate for every major hyperscaler and AI model developer globally, including Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon, as well as independent labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic. CEO Jensen Huang has indicated the company anticipates $500 billion in GPU sales through the end of 2026, a figure that would dwarf previous revenue expectations and, if realised, would cement Nvidia’s claim as the defining commercial beneficiary of the current technological era. The company has invested up to $100 billion in OpenAI, one of its most important customers, adding a strategic dimension that goes beyond the traditional supplier relationship.
There are cautionary signals embedded within the rally, however. Morningstar’s chief US market strategist noted that many AI mega-cap stocks already trade near or exceed fair value estimates, offering limited cushion if AI revenue growth disappoints. Alphabet announced new proprietary chips intended to compete with Nvidia’s offerings when they become available to cloud customers later this year, a competitive development that could gradually erode the near-monopoly position Nvidia currently holds in AI training hardware. The question markets have not yet fully resolved is whether the AI chip demand cycle is secular or cyclical, and at $5 trillion in market cap, any change in that narrative carries enormous consequences.
For now, the balance of evidence favours continued optimism. The SOX index’s winning streak, Intel’s dramatic earnings reset, and Nvidia’s return to all-time closing highs all point to an investor base that has decided, at least for the near term, that artificial intelligence infrastructure spending is a structural force rather than a passing cycle. The hyperscalers all report earnings next week, and any upgrade to data centre capex guidance from Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, or Meta would likely sustain the momentum into May.
