Nvidia Stock Set to Add $370 Billion in Value as Wall Street Buys Jensen Huang's Growth Story

Nvidia closed Wednesday at $209.66 a share. Pre-market indications Thursday put the stock above $225, a gain of more than 7 percent that would add roughly $370 billion to the company's market capitalization in a single trading session, according to The Independent. That's a bigger one-day gain than the entire market value of HSBC, London's largest bank on the FTSE 100.

This move is a reaction to Wednesday's earnings report and call, not a new data point. Nvidia already reported $96.2 billion in fiscal second-quarter revenue, up 106 percent year-over-year, and issued guidance for 70 percent revenue growth in fiscal 2028, both covered in prior reporting. What's new since then is how Wall Street actually priced it.

The Stock Move, Broken Down

Matt Britzman, senior equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, called the results "another monster set of results" that topped forecasts on both revenue and earnings, according to Yahoo Finance. He said Nvidia's third-quarter guidance, calling for $108 billion in revenue, "points to revenue comfortably above $110bn."

Ben Barringer, head of technology research at Quilter Cheviot, told The Independent that Huang's call answered investors' biggest worry: durability. Barringer pointed to Nvidia's disclosure of roughly $2 trillion in backlog as evidence "demand remains exceptionally strong." He said the stock "was initially flat after the results but rose around 5 per cent following the call." Huang's commentary, not just the raw numbers, moved the market.

Kathleen Brooks, research director at XTB, said Nvidia has "proven that criticism of its investment and financing model for AI is overblown," and argued the results "could give the whole AI trade, and the US stock market, a shot in the arm" after months of volatility in tech stocks, per The Independent.

Not everyone is fully sold. Dan Coatsworth, head of markets at AJ Bell, cautioned that despite the pre-market rise, "not everyone would be convinced over the long-term continued growth story within AI," according to The Independent.

The Circular Financing Question

Nvidia has spent the past year plowing money into the same companies that buy its chips, including OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX, according to Yahoo Finance. Critics have called this a circular economy: Nvidia funds customers, customers buy Nvidia chips, and revenue on both sides looks stronger than the underlying demand might actually support. If a meaningful chunk of Nvidia's growth is being financed by Nvidia itself, the headline numbers become harder to read as pure organic demand.

Huang pushed back on that Wednesday, and investors bought his answer, at least for now. Barringer said "management provided reassuring answers to most of them" on backlog and durability. But believing the explanation is not the same as having the concern resolved. Coatsworth noted that critics still point to "circular finance activities that have nasty connotations with the dotcom boom and bust of the late 1990s and early 2000s."

The Bigger Picture: One Stock, Whole Market

Yahoo Finance noted that roughly 40 percent of the U.S. stock market is now concentrated in ten companies heavily invested in AI. Nvidia's report doesn't just move Nvidia. Global Banking and Finance reported that Asian chipmakers in Nvidia's supply chain rallied on the news, with the KOSPI up 1.8 percent, and S&P 500 e-mini futures climbing 0.5 percent ahead of Thursday's U.S. open.

The actual catalyst, as Fox News' Ted Mortonson noted ahead of the report, was whether Nvidia could clear a bar Wall Street had already set sky-high, given semiconductor stocks had broken their 100-day moving averages heading into earnings.

Also new since the last earnings-focused coverage: gold rallied 0.7 percent to $4,624.14, bitcoin rose 0.5 percent to $78,822.84 and ether gained 0.8 percent to $2,492.30, all part of what Global Banking and Finance described as a revival of "dollar debasement trades" following a U.S. Treasury intervention in bond markets last week. Whether that rally has anything to do with Nvidia specifically, or is a separate dollar story running in parallel, is not established by these sources.

The open question heading into Thursday's regular session: does the 7.3 percent pre-market gain actually hold once trading begins, or does profit-taking cut into it.