Nvidia has recorded the biggest daily jump in market value in the history of Wall Street.
The California-based chip maker on Wednesday added $330bn to its market capitalisation – blasting past the previous record it set in February with a $277bn single-day gain.
Shares of Nvidia soared nearly 13 percent, buoyed by expectations that demand for its chips will remain strong after Microsoft on Tuesday announced that AI-related capital spending in the 2024 fiscal year rose 60 percent to $69bn.
Nvidia’s latest stock rally takes its market cap to $2.88 trillion, making it the world’s third-most valuable company after Apple and Microsoft.
Nvidia, whose graphics processing units (GPUs) are integral to the development of AI, briefly became the world’s most valuable company in June after knocking Microsoft off the top spot with a market cap of $3.335 trillion.
Nvidia shares have risen more than 150 percent during the past year, more than any other major US company by far.
The company’s stellar run has also been marked by extreme volatility, with the latest rally coming just a day after shares dropped 7 percent, wiping $193bn off the company’s value.
Founded in 1993 with a focus on 3D graphics for gaming, Nvidia planted the seeds of its success when it began developing GPUs for other applications during the 2000s.
Buoyed by voracious demand from tech giants such as Microsoft, Meta and Google, the company now controls about 80 percent of the market for chips used in data centres needed to run AI models.
Nvidia went public in 1999, trading at $12 a share.
An investor who bought 100 shares of Nvidia at the time for $1,200 would today hold stock worth more than $5.6m.
