Nvidia shares climbed 1.3 percent to $233.95 on Friday, after an intraday peak of $237.88 briefly set a new record. The move extends a recovery that has lifted the stock roughly 23 percent from its late-July trough and 45 percent from the 52-week low of $164.27 reached in May. Market capitalization now sits near $5.6 trillion, leaving the chipmaker less than $400 billion short of a $6 trillion valuation, a threshold no company has ever crossed.
The buyback that reset the narrative
On September 28 the board authorized a $150 billion increase to the repurchase program, raising the remaining allowance to $235 billion through fiscal 2028. The single-step expansion is the largest in corporate history, eclipsing the $110 billion Apple approved in 2024. Quarterly revenue has surpassed $96 billion, and Jensen Huang said the cash flow supports both aggressive R&D spending and large-scale shareholder returns. The announcement gave investors a concrete reason to stay long alongside the more speculative AI-demand story.
AI agents shift the demand argument
Sentiment had soured over the summer as investors questioned whether infrastructure spending could sustain its pace. That narrative has flipped in recent weeks. Focus has turned to autonomous AI agents, systems that can execute multi-step tasks with minimal human direction. Meta’s Muse project is among the developments cited as evidence that a new layer of compute demand is emerging. The theory is that agents will require continuous, high-intensity inference capacity, keeping Nvidia’s data-center chips fully utilized even if training clusters plateau.
Valuation leaves no margin for error
The stock is up about 25 percent year to date, on track for a fourth straight year of double-digit gains. Shares have risen 20 percent in three months and 32 percent in six. Over five years the return exceeds 1,000 percent. At a $5.6 trillion valuation, any revision to AI spending expectations moves the market cap by hundreds of billions of dollars in a single session. The company also unveiled a double-layered security framework designed to prevent autonomous agents from operating outside defined guardrails, a nod to the safety concerns that could eventually regulate the very demand bulls are counting on.