Nvidia shares closed at a record on Monday as Wall Street gears up for earnings season and updates from all of the chipmaker’s top customers on their planned spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The stock climbed 2.4% to close at $138.07, topping its prior high of $135.58 on June 18. The shares are now up almost 180% for the year and have soared more than nine-fold since the beginning of 2023.
Nvidia, widely viewed as the company selling the picks and shovels for the AI gold rush, has been the biggest beneficiary of the generative AI boom, which started with the public release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022. Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) are used to create and deploy advanced AI models that power ChatGPT and similar applications.
Companies including Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Amazon are purchasing Nvidia GPUs in large quantities to build increasingly large clusters of computers for their advanced AI work. Those companies are all slated to report quarterly results by the end of October.