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Nvidia shares hit a record high on Wednesday, marking a turnaround for the chip company following a rocky start to the year marked by US-China tensions over critical artificial intelligence technology.
The US chip designer’s shares rose 4 per cent, surpassing an all-time high intraday price set in January, as it vies with Microsoft and Apple to be the world’s most valuable company.
The rally came as Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang gave a bullish outlook at the company’s annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday about its ability to continue its explosive growth over the next decade. He cited the “multitrillion-dollar opportunity” of AI and robotics.
“We are at the beginning of a decade-long AI infrastructure build-out: demand for sovereign AI is growing around the world,” Huang told shareholders.
Nvidia has rebuilt the optimism around its stock, which was dented earlier this year when a breakthrough by China’s DeepSeek led to concerns about the durability of Nvidia’s dominant position in the global AI infrastructure market. That event wiped nearly $600bn from the company’s market value.
Its stock was also knocked after US President Donald Trump introduced new restrictions on Nvidia’s China-specific H20 AI chips in his trade conflict with China.
The move has closed off Nvidia’s access to the Chinese market, which it says could reach $50bn in the coming years. Nvidia is considering a redesign to its Blackwell chips to continue to serve the China market while complying with the export controls.
Daniel Newman, chief executive of the Futurum Group, said the rally was “about the ability of Nvidia to move as fast as it’s moving”.
“Even though cloud providers like Amazon and Microsoft want to build their own vertically integrated AI infrastructure, right now there’s no situation where the best technology stack isn’t Nvidia,” he said.
Threats from competitors such as AMD to take market share for advanced AI chips did not matter “if it’s a $400bn market in the next four years”.
Nvidia has committed to an annual release of AI chips and is positioning itself for the launch of Vera Rubin, which will follow its current-generation Blackwell systems that have seen massive demand, including from sovereign infrastructure deals with Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
“Nvidia is riding a general chip wave,” said G Dan Hutcheson, vice-president at TechInsights, with markets recovering from the impact of Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs and the DeepSeek breakthrough. “Nvidia was oversold because of both.”