by Aditya Soni

(Reuters) – Nvidia soared 24.33% in early trading on Wall Street on Thursday, approaching a capitalization of $1 trillion, after the publication of forecasts unanimously considered remarkable by observers for the sector. artificial intelligence.

The American group saw its capitalization increase by approximately 190 billion dollars, to reach 945 billion dollars.

It is close to surpassing the record currently held by Apple, which took 190.90 billion dollars in capitalization on the November 10 session alone.

Since the beginning of the year, Nvidia has posted an increase of 159.5%, when the iPhone manufacturer takes “only” 33%. Nvidia, the fifth most valued American company, said it expects quarterly sales to be more than 50% higher than the Wall Street consensus. The group plans to increase its supply of artificial intelligence chips in the second half to meet rising demand. Its chief executive Jensen Huang said the current $1 trillion data center equipment should be replaced with AI chips.

Analysts were quick to raise their price targets on Nvidia, with 27 of them believing that all paths in AI lead to whoever supplies the chips used for ChatGPT and more.

“In over 15 years of doing this work, we’ve never seen a forecast like Nvidia’s for Q2 which was, by all accounts, phenomenal and shattered expectations,” said Stacy Rasgon. at Bernstein.

The group’s announcements bode well for big tech companies that are increasingly interested in artificial intelligence as traditional profit engines of digital advertising and the cloud are threatened by weak technology. ‘economy.

Alphabet, Microsoft Corp and AMD shares advanced 1.78% to 9.28%. “The historic inflection point could be the AI ​​revolution, with Nvidia as the key barometer,” said Dan Ives at Wedbush.

(Aditya Soni in Bangalore, Laetitia Volga, edited by Blandine Hénault)

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