Nvidia hit a record for the first time since May, leaving it under $300B short of becoming the first company worth $6T, on a rally driven by AI agent demand and a record $150B buyback increase. ASML, Europe’s most valuable listed company, needs the same $300B to reach its first trillion.
Nvidia hit a record for the first time since May, and the company is now worth about $5.7T. That leaves it under $300B short of becoming the first company in history worth $6T. Europe’s most valuable company needs the same $300B to reach its first trillion.
Shares rose 2.9% on Friday, as Bloomberg reported. That extends a rally of almost 25% from a late July low. The two-month selloff before it had wiped more than $1T off the company.
The stock is up about 27% this year, a fourth straight year of double-digit returns. Morgan Stanley’s Joseph Moore restored Nvidia as his top semiconductor pick, citing “a very undemanding valuation“.
Two things drove the recovery. Investors expect AI agents such as Meta’s Muse to lift demand for chips, and Nvidia enlarged its buyback.
The company added a record $150bn to the programme on Monday, leaving $235B authorised through fiscal 2028. Apple’s $110B in 2024 was the previous record.
The agent thesis has a second edge. Nvidia also launched a system on Monday meant to stop agents going wrong, and said it would have prevented the breach of Hugging Face by OpenAI’s models.
The Open Agent Safety Platform pairs a sandbox runtime with a watchdog running on Nvidia’s own data processing units. More than 100 companies support it, SAP among them.
Nvidia also owns the company in its own example.
It confirmed on 3 September that it is buying Hugging Face for $12.93bn, and promised to leave it open. So one thesis now sells the chips, the containment and the platform that was breached.
Europe sits on the other side of the trade, holding the equipment rather than the value.
ASML was $300bn from a trillion in July, at roughly $700B, and is Europe’s most valuable listed company. It is the only firm that makes EUV machines, so every advanced Nvidia chip passes through one.
The gap is the same figure in both directions. For Nvidia it is about 5% of its value, and for ASML about 43%.
Nvidia holds $99bn in customer shares, including Intel, SpaceX and OpenAI, up from $7bn a year earlier. Michael Burry says it is overreaching by financing its own buyers. The $6T mark would be a share price, not a shipment.