Nvidia Corp. is on the verge of becoming the first company with a $6 trillion market capitalization as investors rotate back into the artificial-intelligence chipmaker after a disappointing start to the year.
The stock is once more at a record high after the company gave a robust revenue outlook and announced the biggest buyback in history, which takes advantage of a valuation that’s near multi-year lows. Those twin pillars — strong growth and a cheap multiple — stand out, especially as investors grapple with high interest rates and tepid economic data.
“Nvidia is attractive on both a growth basis and a value basis, and it looks like a haven from any damage higher rates could do to the economy,” said Jim Awad, senior managing director at Clearstead Advisors, which owns Nvidia shares. “All of which makes it such an attractive proposition here and a place people should continue to gravitate to if they have concerns.”
Shares rose as much 1.9% on in early trading Tuesday, propelling the S&P 500 Index to its first record since August. The stock is up 30% this year in a rally that has added $1.3 trillion to Nvidia’s market capitalization, bringing it to just shy of $5.8 trillion. The company also is by far the biggest contributor to the S&P 500’s 14% gain in 2026.
The move is particularly striking considering the stock was down 11% for the year on March 30 as investors questioned the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on AI infrastructure. Since then, sentiment around the AI landscape has flipped, with more existential questions about the potential threats it poses to humanity now leading the conversation. Meanwhile, inflation risks and the likelihood of interest-rate hikes by the Federal Reserve have made megacap technology companies like Nvidia look relatively safe to investors.
“As rate hike fears have materialized money starts to move into these megacap tech stocks because they’re a little bit more resistant to rate hikes,” said Larry Tentarelli of Blue Chip Daily, adding that the semiconductor sector has also seen a rebound spurred by Meta Platforms Inc.’s Muse AI agent. There’s “big rotation back into semis, a big rotation back into the megacaps and both of those play out well for Nvidia.”
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The lure for investors was underlined by Nvidia’s authorization of an additional $150 billion under its existing share-repurchase program, which Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang said “reflects our confidence in the long-term opportunity ahead.” Prior to that, he called Nvidia “the world’s first and only growth value stock.”
Wall Street tends to like buybacks as they represent payouts to stockholders and reduce a companies’ outstanding shares, providing a lift to earnings per share. Nvidia’s repurchase is unique among Big Tech companies, which are primarily using their cash for AI spending, with the exception of Apple Inc.
The buyback “is what investors want to see,” as it shows the company “sharing the wealth of their crazy high profit margins with investors,” Mizuho Securities analyst Jordan Klein wrote in a Sept. 28 note to clients.
While there is an argument that buybacks are just a way for companies to inflate their earnings per share without organic growth, that hardly applies to Nvidia. In its previous report, the chipmaker projected that sales would expand 70% in fiscal 2028, well above the 45% growth that had been expected.
“The reason it’s able to do this huge buyback is because it is growing so fast that it has more money than it knows what to do with,” Clearstead’s Awad said. “It remains on the cutting edge of an AI revolution that shows no signs of abating, and the demand it is seeing seems insensitive to rising rates, which adds to confidence in the sustainability.”
Nvidia’s net income is expected to double in fiscal 2027, which ends in January, with revenue leaping 90%. A year ago, both figures rose 65%.
But even with all that, Nvidia is still lagging the overall semiconductor sector this year. The Philadelphia Stock Exchange Semiconductor Index has gained 87% in 2026, fueled by companies like Micron Technology Inc., Marvell Technology Inc. and Intel Corp., whose stock prices are up more than 200% even as they trade below their record highs hit earlier in the year.
Of course, at least part of Nvidia’s problem is simply the market’s physics — it’s now the biggest stock in the world, and it takes a lot to jolt shares that have been far and away the best performers in the S&P 500 for a decade. Can this growth just keep on going?
That question is at the heart of why the stock now trades at less than 18 times earnings expected over the next 12 months, close to its lowest level in 10 years and a discount to the S&P 500 Index, which is priced at 19 times forward earnings.
“Nvidia is a cheap stock, but the problem that Nvidia runs into, it’s almost a victim of its own success,” Tentarelli said. “It just takes so much to move the needle.”
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