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Fresh buzz around AI lifted Nvidia stock to a record $138 on Monday, extending its rally to 18% over the last nine trading days.
The microchip maker's market value has jumped by $517 billion from its October 1 close to hit $3.39 trillion. It's now less than 4% away from overtaking Apple, worth $3.52 trillion, as the world's most valuable public company.
Nvidia has gained more value in nine days of trading than some of the world's largest companies are worth.
Oracle ($488 billion), Mastercard ($468 billion), and Home Depot ($413 billion) are all less than one-sixth as valuable, even though Nvidia only made $61 billion of revenue and less than $30 billion of net income last year.
The chipmaker's shares have surged by about 179% this year, and by around 800% since the start of 2023. One of the biggest beneficiaries has been founder and CEO Jensen Huang, whose net worth has ballooned from about $14 billion to $121 billion in under two years.
He now ranks as the world's 11th richest person on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, ahead of computing pioneer Michael Dell and fashion mogul Amancio Ortega.
Nvidia's latest rally reflects investors' excitement about its new Blackwell chip, which Huang has hailed as "the engine to power this new industrial revolution."
Its significance was evident back in March, when a press release announcing its arrival included quotes from Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI's Sam Altman, Oracle's Larry Ellison, Microsoft's Satya Nadella, Amazon's Andy Jassy, and Alphabet's Sundar Pichai.
Nvidia bosses said in late August they would ramp up Blackwell production in the fourth quarter and sell chips worth billions of dollars before the year ends.
More recently, Huang and Nvidia's partners have described immense demand for the processors — designed to power AI applications at a fraction of the cost and energy consumption of predecessors — and other chipmakers like Super Micro Computer have reported brisk sales.
Rival chipmaker AMD posted its steepest stock decline in more than a month on Monday after it revealed new AI chips but provided few details on customer demand and financial performance.
