Nvidia’s stock closes at record high, sending AI-chip maker to $1.2 trillion market cap

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,
+7.69%
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,
+2.81%

GOOGL,
+2.72%
announced that the chip maker’s cutting-edge data-center chips are powering Google Cloud Platform and its PaxML large language model.