Nvidia added some $140 billion in market value Monday ahead of a key speech from its centibillionaire CEO Jensen Huang, briefly reclaiming the mantle as the most valuable company on earth for the unquestioned leader of the generative artificial intelligence wave.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivers a speech last June.
Shares of Nvidia climbed 4% by mid-afternoon trading, rising to about $150 per share, which would top the previous record close of $148.88 set Nov. 7.
The Monday surge sent Nvidia’s market capitalization to as high as $3.73 trillion, briefly eclipsing the market cap of Apple before the iPhone maker narrowly took back its title as Nvidia vies for its first market close as the world’s highest valued company since Nov. 25, according to YCharts data.
The Nvidia rally came amid a broader rally in U.S. stocks — the tech-heavy Nasdaq rose more than 1% to a 2025 high — and a global spike in share prices of other players in the semiconductor chip industry, as shares of Netherlands-based ASML, Taiwan-based TSMC and UK-based Arm Holdings gained at least 6% apiece.
Semiconductor stocks received a boost from record fourth quarter revenue data from the Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn, a bullish signal for to-be-reported Q4 data for Nvidia and other AI companies.
Also helping Nvidia and its peers was the Washington Post reporting President-elect Donald Trump’s tariffs will initially target sectors other than semiconductors, good news for an industry heavily reliant on the global supply chain for designing and manufacturing the chips powering technology from iPhones to ChatGPT, OpenAI’s generative AI chatbot (Trump denied the report).
Huang will deliver Monday’s keynote address at the CES 2025 technology conference beginning at approximately 6:30 p.m. EST. The speech should include “reassuring updates” on the company’s Blackwell and Rubin graphics processing unit systems, Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya wrote in a recent note to clients, predicting Huang’s speech will be a “positive catalyst” for the stock. Rosenblatt analysts Kevin Cassidy and Hans Mosesmann concurred they expect to see a “bullish Jensen Huang” on Monday, laying out a case for Nvidia’s competitive advantage in addressing the full-stack of technology needed to power AI.
Nvidia designs a majority of the custom semiconductor chips powering generative AI systems, and its notable clientele includes Amazon, Meta, OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI. Founded in 1993 by Huang and two other engineers, Nvidia spent much of its existence best known for its video games graphics business before rising to fame as the face of the 2020s AI boom. No company has ever achieved a $4 trillion valuation, though Apple and Nvidia are both within 10% of hitting the milestone.
786%. That’s how much Nvidia’s share price has risen since Nov. 30, 2022, the launch of ChatGPT. An $1,000 investment in Nvidia at that time is now worth nearly $9,000.
Huang’s net worth rose by about $5 billion Monday, the third most of any billionaire, according to our real-time net worth tracker. Huang’s $131 billion fortune makes him the ninth-richest person on the planet, rising more than twentyfold over the last five years. Most of Huang’s net worth comes from his 3.5% stake in Nvidia, the largest of any individual.