Nvidia Hits Record High as Market Value Reaches $5.7 Trillion
In brief
- Nvidia shares reached a record $237.88 in Friday trading, lifting the chipmaker's market value to roughly $5.7 trillion, the largest of any company.
- The board added $150 billion to Nvidia's buyback authorization on Sept. 28, bringing the total to $235 billion through fiscal 2028.
- U.S. employers added 29,000 jobs in September against forecasts near 90,000, cooling bets on a Fed rate hike as the Nasdaq rose.
Nvidia stock hit a record high on Friday, reaching $237.88 in morning trading and lifting the chipmaker's market value to roughly $5.7 trillion. It's the first record since May.
Market value, or market cap, is the share price multiplied by every share in existence. Think of it as the price tag on the entire company. Nvidia's is now the largest of any business on Earth.
Nvidia was worth $1.18 trillion in August 2023, at that point topping the entire crypto market. It passed Apple at $3 trillion in June 2024, then became the first company to hit $5 trillion in October 2025. For reference, at the moment, total crypto market capitalization—including Bitcoin and all—stands at just above $3 trillion.
The stock is up more than 40% from its March 30 low of $165.17. And this isn't only a Silicon Valley story. Nvidia sits in the S&P 500, so if your retirement account holds an index fund, you already own a slice of it.
Nvidia makes GPUs, or graphics processing units: chips first built for video games that turned out to be ideal for training and running AI. Tech giants buy them by the hundreds of thousands. Amazon's cloud arm plans to deploy about 1 million through 2027, and xAI’s facilities—which also serve Anthropic—already own half a million chips with plans to triple that amount in the near future..
Nvidia reported $96.2 billion in revenue for the quarter ended July 26, up 106% from a year earlier, per its earnings release. Data centers, the buildings full of servers that run AI, brought in $89 billion of that.
CEO Jensen Huang said in the same release: "Now, compute is revenue." Compute is industry shorthand for computing power, which is what those chips supply. In plain terms, Nvidia's sales are other companies' AI budgets.
Why now
Monday brought the buyback. Nvidia's board added $150 billion to its repurchase authorization, lifting the total to $235 billion through fiscal 2028, which the company called the largest increase in history. A buyback means a company spends its own cash to purchase its shares, leaving fewer in circulation, so each remaining share is a bigger slice of the company. Leaving less stock in circulation makes the available ones more attractive.
On Sept. 23, Supermicro said it had started shipping racks, the standard cabinets that hold servers inside a data center, built on Nvidia's newest platform, Vera Rubin. Each rack carries 72 Rubin GPUs.
Then came Friday's jobs report. Employers added just 29,000 jobs in September against forecasts near 90,000, and unemployment rose to 4.2%.
→Bad news for workers, but stocks rallied anyway. The weak numbers cooled bets that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates. Higher rates make borrowing pricier for everyone, including the companies building AI data centers. Considering Nvidia already monopolizes the industry, this difficulty to get debt hurts competitors more than it hurts Nvidia.
Nvidia also funds its own customers. It committed up to $100 billion to OpenAI in September 2025, but the final stake came to $30 billion, with another $10 billion going to Anthropic.
Its own books carry weight too. Nvidia disclosed $366 billion in multiyear AI infrastructure commitments, with $279 billion of that tied mostly to memory procurement.
Nvidia has forecast $108 billion in revenue for the current quarter, a company projection known as guidance, and it holds $235 billion in buyback authority to spend through January 2028.