A Historic Moment.

On Wednesday, June 5th, Eastern Time, Nvidia's stock surged over 5%, reaching a new all-time high. At the close, Nvidia was priced at $1,224.4 per share, with a market cap of $3.01 trillion, officially surpassing Apple to become the world's second most valuable company, closely trailing Microsoft ($3.15 trillion).

Since the beginning of this year, Nvidia's stock has skyrocketed, accumulating a gain of over 147%, following a nearly 240% increase last year.

The recent rise in Nvidia's stock is closely related to the upgrade of the Blackwell chip. At COMPUTEX 2024, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced that Nvidia plans to launch a high-performance version of the Blackwell chip, Blackwell Ultra, in 2025, and a new AI chip platform, Rubin, in 2026, with the Rubin Ultra version debuting in 2027. Nvidia claims that the Blackwell B200 GPU, dubbed "the world's most powerful chip," boasts FP4 floating-point performance of up to 20 petaflops, marking a significant leap in computing power.

As a leader in AI, Nvidia's chips have garnered significant market attention since OpenAI released ChatGPT at the end of 2022. Over the past year, companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and OpenAI have spent billions of dollars purchasing Nvidia's GPUs (advanced and expensive chips for developing and deploying AI applications), driving Nvidia's sales to soar. The impressive release of the Blackwell chip further boosted Nvidia's stock price.

Additionally, Nvidia's first-quarter earnings report, which exceeded expectations, contributed to the stock's upward momentum. Data shows that Nvidia's first-quarter revenue reached $26.04 billion, up 262% year-over-year, surpassing LSEG's forecast of $24.65 billion. Net profit soared 628% year-over-year to $14.88 billion, and adjusted earnings per share were $6.12, also above LSEG's consensus estimate of $5.59.

Nvidia's largest and most important data center sales surged 427% last year, reaching $22.6 billion. Nvidia attributed this growth to the shipment of its "Hopper" graphics processors (including the H100 GPU) and robust sales of networking components (more than triple the same period last year).

Despite the impressive first-quarter financial performance, Nvidia expects second-quarter sales to exceed Wall Street expectations, reaching $28 billion. Jensen Huang stated that the next-generation AI GPU "Blackwell" will drive further growth: "We will see a significant amount of Blackwell chip revenue in this year's earnings reports. Blackwell chip products will ship this quarter, ramp up production in the third quarter, and be deployed in data centers in the fourth quarter."

Executives noted that the supply-demand imbalance for H200 and Blackwell chips "could persist until 2025," believing that "sovereign AI will grow from nothing to a multi-billion-dollar market."

Nvidia also announced a 1-for-10 stock split, effective at the opening on Monday, June 10th. Nvidia shareholders will receive nine additional shares for each share held after the close on Friday, June 7th, and shareholders on record by the close on June 6th will receive nine additional shares per common share. The company plans to increase its dividend from $0.04 to $0.10 per share.

For investors, higher dividends will further reflect the value of Nvidia's rising stock price.