Nvidia hits record $5 trillion mark as CEO dismisses AI bubble concerns (arstechnica.com)

Nvidia became the first company to hit a $5 trillion market capitalization after CEO Jensen Huang used the company’s GTC keynote to announce roughly $500 billion in cumulative orders for its next‑gen AI processors and plans to build seven supercomputers for the U.S. government. Huang said Nvidia expects to ship about 20 million units of its newest chips (Blackwell and Rubin) through 2026 versus roughly 4 million units for the previous Hopper generation over its lifetime. The stock jumped ~4.6% after the announcements and has climbed nearly 12‑fold since ChatGPT’s late‑2022 debut. The milestone signals massive investor confidence in AI compute demand and cements Nvidia’s central role in the AI infrastructure stack, from data‑center accelerators to national strategic compute projects. Technically, the scale-up from Hopper to Blackwell/Rubin implies a step‑function increase in silicon volume and data‑center capacity, but it also concentrates market exposure: analysts warn valuations may be overheated and that the ecosystem currently depends on a few dominant players financing each other’s capacity. Huang dismissed “AI bubble” concerns, arguing customers are paying for real services, yet the market’s sensitivity to cash‑flow vs. capacity announcements remains a key risk for the AI/ML community to monitor.