Nvidia’s market cap tops $4.5 trillion after string of AI infrastructure deals

Nvidia shares reached a fresh record on Tuesday, climbing almost 3% and lifting the chipmaker’s market cap past $4.5 trillion.

The stock is now up about 39% for the year, and continues to attract investors as Nvidia steps up its pace of deal-making, cementing its position at the center of the artificial intelligence boom.

OpenAI said last week that Nvidia would take an equity stake worth up to $100 billion in the AI startup, and would build hundreds of billions of dollars worth of data centers filled with Nvidia graphics processing units. OpenAI then announced five massive new data centers with Oracle that are expected to be filled with hundreds of thousands of GPUs. The whole “Stargate” project will cost $500 billion, the companies said.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says Nvidia’s products comprise about 70% of the spending on a new AI data center.

Analysts at Citi on Tuesday raised their price target on Nvidia from $200 to $210, citing an increased forecast for AI infrastructure spending after the OpenAI announcements.

“We believe OpenAI came to Nvidia asking for help as Nvidia has a very compelling product, and as the number of users and compute being consumed per user basis is growing,” Citi analyst Atif Malik wrote in the note.

OpenAI is far from alone, as Meta, Google and others are also dramatically ramping up their infrastructure spending.

CoreWeave, a cloud provider that includes Nvidia as a large shareholder, said Tuesday it had reached a deal to supply Meta with $14.2 billion in AI infrastructure services.

Nvidia’s stock is outperforming all of its megacap peers so far this year except for chipmaker Broadcom, which is up about 40%, similarly boosted by OpenAI.

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