Nvidia storms past $5T valuation as AI boom powers meteoric rise (www.reuters.com)

Nvidia’s market value surged past $5 trillion after a fresh stock rally driven by major customer deals and sustained demand for its AI-focused data‑center chips. The jump not only added billions to CEO Jensen Huang’s net worth but also put the company at the center of geopolitics: reports say U.S. President Trump plans to raise Nvidia chips in talks with China’s Xi Jinping, underscoring how advanced AI accelerators have become a diplomatic bargaining chip. Investors are pricing in outsized revenue growth from GPU sales for both cloud providers and enterprise AI deployments. For the AI/ML community the move is a clear signal that high‑performance accelerators remain the bottleneck and driver of progress — access to large pools of GPU/accelerator compute fuels training of bigger models and faster inference. That concentration of market power raises practical implications: intensified competition from other silicon designers, heightened supply‑chain and export‑control scrutiny, potential shifts in cloud pricing and capacity, and greater incentive for on‑prem or alternative-architecture investment. In short, Nvidia’s valuation milestone reflects not just market euphoria but a structural dependence of modern AI on specialized hardware, with consequences for research throughput, commercialization and global technology policy.