Nvidia returns to a $5 trillion market cap and closed at a new record of $208

Nvidia climbed back above a $5 trillion market value on Friday and finished the session at a new closing record, putting the chipmaker back at the top of the global stock market.

The stock surged by as much as 4.2% during the day, and that single rally added over $200 billion to Nvidia’s value. At its session high, the company was worth about $5.12 trillion, based on Google Finance data.

The buying came during a strong day for chip stocks. Intel’s earnings helped lift sentiment across semiconductors, while Oklo’s nuclear power deal gave investors another reason to keep watching companies tied to AI power demand.

Nvidia ended Friday at $208 per share, its highest close ever. That price is still below the stock’s $212.19 intraday record from October 29, 2025, but not by much.

Nvidia uses April’s chip rally to erase its weak first quarter and widen its lead over Alphabet

Nvidia is now worth about $1 trillion more than Alphabet, which sits in second place by market cap. That gap matters because it shows how far AI hardware has pulled ahead of the rest of Big Tech in public markets.

The stock did not start the year like this. During the first three months, Nvidia fell 6.4%, and traders had a real reason to question whether the AI trade was cooling.

April changed the picture fast. Over the past month, Nvidia shares gained 20%, helped by the wider rebound in semiconductor stocks. Over the past 52 weeks, NVDA is up 101%. 

The S&P 500 gained 32.2% in the same period, while the Technology Select Sector SPDR ETF rose 57.4%. That is not a small lead. That is the kind of gap that keeps Nvidia glued to every trading desk screen.

The next big date is May 20, when Nvidia reports earnings. Analysts expect the company to post diluted profit of $1.70 per share, compared with $0.77 a year earlier. That would be a 120.8% jump. Nvidia has beaten analyst forecasts in three of its last four earnings reports and missed once.

For the full year, analysts expect NVDA to report $7.77 in earnings per share, up 70% from $4.57 in fiscal 2026. They also expect earnings to reach $10.31 in fiscal 2028, which would be a 32.7% increase from the year before.

Wall Street still leans hard toward the stock. Out of 49 analysts covering Nvidia, 44 rate it Strong Buy, three have Moderate Buy, one has Hold, and one has Strong Sell. The average price target is $268.80, which points to 34.6% upside from current levels.

Nvidia builds its quantum software case while NIO and DeepSeek work around U.S. chips

The latest stock strength also came after Nvidia released Ising, a group of open-source AI models built for quantum computing work. The models deal with two hard problems in the field: calibration and error correction.

Ising can cut qubit calibration from days to hours. It also gives 2.5 times faster real-time decoding and 3 times better accuracy than pyMatching.

Ising works with CUDA-Q and NVQLink. IonQ, Rigetti Computing, and major labs have already adopted it. That puts NVDA deeper into quantum software, not just AI chips. For investors, the point is simple. Nvidia is trying to keep its platform central in more than one next-generation computing market.

China’s AI side is doing the same thing. DeepSeek released a preview version of V4 on Friday. The model has been adapted to run on Huawei chips, which fits China’s plan to rely less on U.S. hardware. 

Cryptopolitan reported in February that DeepSeek had said that it did not send the new model to American chipmakers for tuning. Instead, it gave early access to local firms such as Huawei, even though it had worked with Nvidia’s technical staff before.

A few hours after the V4 preview, Huawei said the model is fully supported on Ascend 950-based supernode clusters. Huawei also said its chips were used for part of V4-Flash training. DeepSeek trained its older V3 and R1 models on Nvidia chips, but it did not say whether V4 used them too.

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