Nvidia (NVDA) shares climbed 4.3% to $208.27 on Friday, putting the chipmaker within $4 of its $212.19 record close from March 14 and adding $217 billion in market value over the past five sessions. The stock's 12-month gain now stands at 100%, and the company's $5.07 trillion market capitalization makes it the largest publicly traded firm in the world by a $640 billion margin over Microsoft.
The catalyst was a sequence of hyperscaler capex updates. Microsoft Azure raised its FY2026 capex outlook to $112 billion, Alphabet to $96 billion and Amazon Web Services to $108 billion, lifting the Big Four cloud guide to a combined $416 billion, up 41% year-on-year. Nvidia is positioned to capture roughly 78% of incremental AI accelerator spending, per Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers.
Blackwell B300 Production Pull-In
Bloomberg reported Friday that TSMC has agreed to pull forward production of Nvidia's Blackwell B300 GPUs by approximately six weeks following supply-chain stabilization at the Arizona Fab 21 facility. The B300, which targets a 1.5-petaflop peak FP8 performance and integrates 256 gigabytes of HBM3e memory, is expected to ship to Microsoft, Meta and Oracle data centers beginning in late June.
Sovereign-AI orders are emerging as a secondary tailwind. Saudi Arabia's HUMAIN consortium signed a 60,000-GPU letter of intent on Wednesday, while the UAE's G42 confirmed an additional 28,000 H200 units beyond the 22,000 disclosed in February. Combined non-U.S. demand could add $42 billion to Nvidia's data-center revenue in the next 12 months, RBC Capital estimates.
Margin Setup Strong
Gross margins are projected to remain near the 75.4% level reported in fiscal Q4. Operating leverage continues to expand: research-and-development as a share of revenue declined to 9.2% in the latest filing, the lowest since fiscal 2022, even as absolute R&D spending hit a record $4.4 billion in the quarter.