Nvidia shares climbed to a record $237.88 in Friday trading, lifting the chipmaker's market value to roughly $5.7 trillion—the largest of any company in the world. It is the stock's first record high since May.

The milestone capped a busy stretch of corporate and macroeconomic news. On Monday, Nvidia's board approved a $150 billion increase to its share buyback authorization, bringing the total to $235 billion through fiscal 2028. On Friday, a much weaker-than-expected U.S. jobs report—29,000 jobs added in September against forecasts near 90,000—cooled bets on a Federal Reserve rate hike as the Nasdaq rose.

The largest company on Earth

Market value, or market cap, is the share price multiplied by every share in existence—effectively the price tag on the entire company. Nvidia's is now the largest of any business on the planet.

The company's climb has been swift. Nvidia was worth $1.18 trillion in August 2023, at that point topping the entire crypto market. It passed Apple at $3 trillion in June 2024, then became the first company to reach $5 trillion in October 2025. For reference, total crypto market capitalization—including Bitcoin and all other tokens—currently stands just above $3 trillion, meaning Nvidia alone is now worth nearly twice the entire crypto market.

The stock is up more than 40% from its March 30 low of $165.17. And this is not only a Silicon Valley story: Nvidia sits in the S&P 500, so anyone whose retirement account holds an index fund already owns a slice of the company. Because the S&P 500 weights companies by market value, Nvidia's swings now carry more influence over index funds than any other single holding.

The chips behind the boom

Nvidia makes GPUs, or graphics processing units: chips first built for video games that turned out to be ideal for training and running artificial intelligence. Technology giants buy them by the hundreds of thousands. Amazon's cloud arm plans to deploy about 1 million GPUs through 2027, and xAI's facilities—which also serve Anthropic—already hold half a million chips, with plans to triple that amount in the near future.

The demand is visible in Nvidia's results The company reported $96.2 billion in revenue for the quarter ended July 26, up 106% from a year earlier, according to its earnings release. Data centers—the buildings full of servers that run AI—brought in $89 billion of that total, or more than nine of every ten revenue dollars.

CEO Jensen Huang said in the same release: "Now, compute is revenue." Compute is industry shorthand for computing power, which is what those chips supply. In plain terms, Nvidia's sales are other companies' AI budgets.

Why now

Monday brought the buyback. Nvidia's board added $150 billion to its repurchase authorization, lifting the total to $235 billion through fiscal 2028, which the company called the largest increase in history, per an official announcement. A buyback means a company spends its own cash to purchase its shares, leaving fewer in circulation, so each remaining share is a bigger slice of the company. A smaller float can also make the available stock more attractive.

On Sept. 23, Supermicro said it had started shipping racks—the standard cabinets that hold servers inside a data center—built on Nvidia's newest platform, Vera Rubin. Each rack carries 72 Rubin GPUs.

Then came Friday's jobs report. U.S. employers added just 29,000 jobs in September against forecasts near 90,000, and unemployment rose to 4.2%. Bad news for workers, but stocks rallied anyway. The weak figures cooled bets that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates. Higher rates make borrowing pricier for everyone, including the companies building AI data centers—and given Nvidia's dominant position in the industry, tighter access to debt hurts its competitors more than it hurts Nvidia.

Commitments and outlook

Nvidia also funds its own customers. It committed up to $100 billion to OpenAI in September 2025, though the final stake came to $30 billion, with another $10 billion going to Anthropic.

Its own books carry weight too. Nvidia disclosed $366 billion in multiyear AI infrastructure commitments, with $279 billion of that tied mostly to memory procurement.

The company has forecast $108 billion in revenue for the current quarter—a company projection known as guidance—and holds $235 billion in buyback authority to spend through January 2028, which marks the end of its fiscal 2028. That forecast implies roughly 12% growth over the quarter just reported, and Nvidia's next earnings report will show whether the projection is met.