Nvidia (NVDA) Stock Is Up, What You Need To Know

What Happened?

Shares of leading designer of graphics chips Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) jumped 1.7% in the afternoon session after investor optimism grew ahead of its fiscal third-quarter earnings report, bolstered by a major new partnership with Microsoft and AI firm Anthropic. 

On the previous day, Nvidia and Microsoft announced a massive strategic partnership, planning to invest up to $10 billion and $5 billion, respectively, in Anthropic. As part of the deal, the AI company committed to using Nvidia's advanced hardware. This news was coupled with high expectations for the earnings results due after the market close, with analysts forecasting revenue to increase by about 56% year-over-year to nearly $55 billion. The positive sentiment was reinforced by several analysts. For instance, Stifel raised its price target on the stock to $250, while Bank of America reiterated its Buy rating, citing a backlog of over $500 billion in orders for the company's Blackwell and Rubin chips.

After the initial pop the shares cooled down to $184.03, up 1.4% from previous close.

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What Is The Market Telling Us

Nvidia’s shares are quite volatile and have had 19 moves greater than 5% over the last year. In that context, today’s move indicates the market considers this news meaningful but not something that would fundamentally change its perception of the business.

The previous big move we wrote about was 6 days ago when the stock dropped 4.2% on the news that markets continued to retreat, as investors re-evaluated the high valuations of stocks that benefited from the artificial intelligence boom. After a fantastic run, many of those high-flying AI and technology stocks saw investors take profits: selling shares to lock in their gains. This is often called a "market rotation." Money is moving out of the red-hot tech sector (which some worry has become too expensive) and into other parts of the market that investors may currently deem more stable or reasonably-priced. There's a secondary reason for the cautious mood: The long government shutdown came to an end. Though it's typically interpreted as good news, it also means a flood of delayed economic reports will be released. For weeks, investors were "flying blind" without key updates on the economy's health, like inflation data and the jobs report. In typical "sell the news" fashion, investors may also be taking profits and selling in anticipation that the new data would potentially give the Federal Reserve reasons to slow or even pause future rate cuts.

Nvidia is up 33.1% since the beginning of the year, but at $184.03 per share, it is still trading 11.1% below its 52-week high of $207.04 from October 2025. Investors who bought $1,000 worth of Nvidia’s shares 5 years ago would now be looking at an investment worth $13,693.

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