shares of NVIDIA Stocks closed up 24% on Thursday on a sizable earnings report, hitting an all-time high and beating consensus estimates.
Nvidia’s previous record high was in November 2021, when the share price closed at just over $333. Shares opened Thursday at $385 and gave back some of the overnight gains.
To put its gains in perspective, Nvidia stock was up 235% from its two-year low of $112 on October 14, outpacing the performance of any other S&P 500 company since then. Meta is the second best performing stock with a gain of 97% during the same time period.
The chipmaker’s market cap was on track to open at $975 billion after a 30% jump in after-hours trading on Wednesday. The company reported first-quarter adjusted earnings of $1.09 per share, versus the Refinitiv consensus estimate of 92 cents. Its first quarter revenue of $7.19 billion was well above the consensus estimate of $6.52 billion.
But it was the chipmaker’s leading position as an AI chip supplier, guiding to $11 billion in sales for the current period, that may have pushed shares even higher.
The share price surge puts Nvidia within reach of a trillion-dollar valuation, something few publicly traded companies have ever achieved. Apple It was first valued at $1 trillion in 2018 and is set to reach a $3 trillion valuation in 2022. Alphabet, AmazonSaudi Aramco, Tesla, meta And Microsoft All have been valued at $1 trillion or more at one point.
Nvidia President and CEO Jensen Huang speaks during the company’s event at the 2019 Consumer Electronics Show on January 6, 2019 in Las Vegas.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Analysts sharply raised price targets for Nvidia after the company reported earnings results. JPMorgan doubled its price target from $250 to $500 and reiterated its overweight rating. “Generative AI and large language/transformer models are rapidly driving demand,” said JP Morgan analyst Harlan Sur.
“What else can we say other than wow,” Evercore analyst CJ Muse wrote in a Wednesday note. Evercore raised its price target from $320 to $500 and reiterated its outperform rating.
The meteoric rise in Nvidia’s valuation isn’t lifting other chip makers, however. The AI chip craze has been fueled by the demand for high-powered graphics processing units, or GPUs. The company has been a historical outperformer in the high-performance “discrete” GPU market, especially compared to intel,
Shares of Nvidia have outperformed the share prices of both Intel and AMD.
But neither Intel, which has reportedly struggled to handle inventory concerns and recently executed significant cost cuts, nor amd Has been able to achieve the same level of share price growth as Nvidia. Shares of Intel were up nearly 10% at market close on Wednesday; AMD shares were up 67% at the same time.
Nvidia shares are now up 160.6% year-to-date.
— CNBC’s Michael Bloom, Robert Humm and Kiff Lesswing contributed to this report.
Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that Nvidia shares are set to close at an all-time high on Thursday. A previous version misstated the day.