Key Insights

Nvidia stock closed Sept. 3 at $228.45, within roughly 3% of its $236.54 record high.

Nvidia agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion and invested $3.5 billion in MediaTek.

Nvidia generated $21.34 billion in quarterly free cash flow and retained about $99 billion of share-repurchase authorization.

Nvidia stock has rebounded sharply from its late-August weakness as investors reassess the durability of global artificial-intelligence infrastructure spending.

NVDA closed Sept. 3 at $228.45, up 1.8% for the session after touching an intraday high of $230.40. The stock now trades within roughly 3% of its 52-week and record high of $236.54.

The recovery coincided with Nvidia's $12.93 billion agreement to acquire Hugging Face and several other large AI investments. Those transactions reinforce Nvidia's strategy of expanding beyond GPU sales into software platforms, custom silicon, cloud infrastructure and financing — a diversification aimed at tying more of the AI software and infrastructure ecosystem to Nvidia's own stack.

Nvidia Stock Rises After $12.93B Hugging Face Acquisition

There are signs that Nvidia is becoming the central bank of the AI industry, thanks to its huge revenue growth and balance sheet.

The company has spent billions of dollars on major investments in the sector. Just this week, it announced a $13 billion deal to buy Hugging Face, a top player in the open-source AI industry whose platform is widely used by developers to host, share and fine-tune open models. It is Nvidia's biggest acquisition ever and positions it for growth as the AI boom gains steam, moving Nvidia deeper into the developer-tooling layer of the AI stack rather than only supplying the underlying chips.

Nvidia also announced a $3.5 billion investment in MediaTek, a leading fabless semiconductor company that designs chips used across the technology industry. MediaTek counts companies like Xiaomi, OPPO, Vivo, and Samsung among its top clients.

The company is in talks to invest $2.5 billion in Thinking Machines, a company started by Mira Murati, who left OpenAI last year. Thinking Machines has recently launched Tinker and Inkling, products it hopes will become major players in the AI industry.

Nvidia has written more checks in the past few months. It announced a $30 billion investment in OpenAI, which may pay off substantially when the company goes public. It also announced a big investment in Anthropic, a company that is plotting a $2 trillion IPO. This listing may happen either later this month or early October — a milestone investors are watching as a potential test of how public markets value frontier AI developers.

The company has also announced large investments in companies like CoreWeave, Nebius, and IREN, which are among the largest buyers of its semiconductors. It has also allocated capital in companies like Coherent, Lumentum, and Intel.

Most recently, Nvidia announced that it will provide the financing backstop for OpenAI's large data center in Ohio. It also announced a huge deal that will see top financial companies like Goldman Sachs, Brookfield, and Blackstone provide $500 billion in financing in the AI space.

Nvidia Has One of the Best Balance Sheets in the World

Nvidia is able to make these investments because of its strong free cash flow (FCF) and balance sheet. Its most recent results showed that revenue jumped to over $96 billion, while net profit stood at over $59 billion. Its recent investments are therefore just a small part of what it earned in the last quarter.

The company has become a big free cash flow machine. Its FCF came in at over $21 billion, and the company predicts it will exceed $100 billion this year. FCF is an important metric that measures the amount of money remaining after a company makes its investments.

Strong free cash flow means the company has the resources to continue its investments and return capital to investors. It is now implementing a $90 billion share buyback program.

Nvidia Stock Price Technical Analysis

NVDA stock chart | Source: TradingView

The weekly chart shows that NVDA has rebounded in the past few months and is now hovering near its highest level on record. It has jumped above the ascending trendline that links the lowest levels in March and July this year.

The stock has remained above the 50-week moving average and the Supertrend indicator, a chart pattern the article's author reads as a sign that bulls are in control. The all-time high sits at $236, and a move above that price would mark new record territory.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Equity markets can experience sharp price movements.