Catenaa, Saturday, April 25, 2026- Nvidia retook the $5 trillion market cap crown on Friday, as a powerful rally in chip stocks, encouraged by Intel earnings and a nuclear power deal with Oklo, boosted shares.
The stock gained as much as 4.2% on Friday, adding more than $200 billion in value to the company’s market capitalization, which rose as high as $5.12 trillion.
Nvidia is now worth $1 trillion more in market cap than the second-largest company, Alphabet. Nvidia also notched a record closing high. At $208 per share, the stock is just off its all-time intraday high of $212.19, reached on October 29, 2025.
Nvidia did not start the year on a sure footing. Through the first three months of the year, shares of the artificial intelligence leader were down 6.4%.
But April has provided a compelling comeback story. Over the past month, Nvidia stock has risen 20%, helped by the broader rally in semiconductor stocks.
Investors were particularly encouraged by a 22% growth in Intel’s data center business, suggesting that the AI-driven demand for hardware is finally translating into a significant recovery for central processing units (CPUs) and advanced packaging services.
The rally quickly spread across the broader semiconductor sector, lifting peers like AMD, Qualcomm, and ARM by over 10%.
This industry-wide lift reflected a growing market consensus that the “AI trade” was broadening beyond Nvidia’s specialized graphics chips to the wider silicon ecosystem.
Nvidia’s shares are not very volatile and have had only 6 moves of more than 5% over the last year. In that context, today’s move indicates the market considers this news meaningful, although it might not fundamentally change its perception of the business.
The previous big move we wrote about was 24 days ago, when the stock gained 3.4% on the news that the company announced a $2 billion strategic investment in custom chip maker Marvell Technology and an expanded partnership to develop artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index, known as the SOX, is on a historic 18-day winning streak, adding tens of billions of dollars in value to companies like Broadcom, Taiwan Semiconductor, Micron, AMD, Intel, and Texas Instruments.
