Nvidia once again topped the $5 trillion market cap on Friday, closing at a new record closing price and returning the semiconductor maker to the top of global stock markets.
The stock soared 4.2% during the day, and that single gain added more than $200 billion to Nvidia’s value. At the high point, the company was worth about $5.12 trillion, based on Google Finance data.
Buying occurred during the day when semiconductor stocks were performing well. While Intel’s earnings helped lift overall semiconductor sentiment, Oklo’s nuclear deal gave investors another reason to keep an eye on companies related to AI’s power needs.
Nvidia closed Friday at $208 per share, its highest closing price ever. This price is still below the stock’s intraday record of $212.19 on October 29, 2025, but not by much.
Nvidia takes advantage of April chip rally to erase first-quarter slump and extend lead over Alphabet
Nvidia is currently worth about $1 trillion more than Alphabet, the second-largest company by market capitalization. This difference is important because it shows how far AI hardware leads other Big Tech companies in the public market.
Stocks didn’t start the year this way. In the first three months, Nvidia was down 6.4%, and traders had real reason to wonder if AI trading was cooling down.
April quickly changed her image. Nvidia stock has risen 20% over the past month, following a broad rally in semiconductor stocks. Over the past 52 weeks, NVDA is up 101%.
Over the same period, the S&P 500 Index rose 32.2%, and the Technology Select Sector SPDR ETF rose 57.4%. That’s no small lead. That’s the kind of gap that Nvidia has glued to the screens of every trading desk.
The next big day is May 20th, when Nvidia reports its earnings. Analysts expect diluted earnings to be $1.70 per share, compared with $0.77 a year ago. That would be a 120.8% jump. Nvidia has exceeded analyst expectations in three of its last four earnings reports, but has missed expectations in one.
Analysts expect NVDA to report full-year earnings of $7.77 per share, up 70% from $4.57 in fiscal 2026. The company also expects its fiscal year 2028 profit to reach $10.31, an increase of 32.7% from the previous year.
Wall Street remains strongly tilted toward stocks. Of the 49 analysts covering Nvidia, 44 rate it a “strong buy,” three rate it a “fair buy,” one rate it a “hold,” and one rate it a “strong sell.” The average price target is $268.80, representing a 34.6% upside from current levels.
NIO and DeepSeek focus on US chips, while NVIDIA builds case for quantum software
The latest share price strength also came after Nvidia released Ising, a group of open source AI models built for quantum computing tasks. This model addresses two difficult problems in the field: calibration and error correction.
Ising reduces qubit calibration from days to hours. It also provides 2.5x faster real-time decoding and 3x more accuracy than pyMatching.
Ising works with CUDA-Q and NVQLink. IonQ, Rigetti Computing, and major research institutions have already adopted it. This will make NVDA more deeply embedded in quantum software, not just AI chips. For investors, the point is simple. Nvidia is positioning its platform at the center of multiple next-generation computing markets.
China’s AI side is doing the same thing. DeepSeek released a preview version of V4 on Friday. The model is tailored to work with Huawei chips and fits with China’s plans to become less dependent on U.S. hardware.
Cryptopolitan reported in February that DeepSeek said it was not sending new models to U.S. chipmakers for tuning. Instead, it gave early access to local companies like Huawei, even though it previously worked with Nvidia’s technical staff.
A few hours after the V4 preview, Huawei announced that this model is fully supported on Ascend 950-based supernode clusters. Huawei also said its chips were used in some of the V4-Flash training. DeepSeek trained the older V3 and R1 models on Nvidia chips, but did not say whether V4 also used them.
