On Friday, Nvidia continued Thursday's rise for 2 consecutive days, and its gains accelerated. The day closed up by more than 6%, bringing the cumulative increase this week to 15%, the biggest weekly increase in 11 months since May last year. At the time, Nvidia's earnings report showed that demand for AI chips far exceeded expectations, with a weekly increase of more than 24%.

This week, Nvidia's market capitalization increased by nearly 290 billion US dollars, and the market capitalization increase on Friday alone brought out an Intel.

Looking back on Friday, the intraday market value fell to 1.9 trillion US dollars, hitting a two-month low due to ultra-microcomputers breaking the previous practice of providing initial results and falling short of expectations, raising investors' concerns about whether the enthusiasm for chip stocks and AI concept stocks in the market was already too high. Market fears spread to Nvidia. Nvidia rarely plummeted 10% in a single day in a single day, the biggest one-day decline since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020.

This week's full recovery meant that Nvidia almost erased all of last week's losses, rebounding 17% from recent lows in just 5 trading days. Nvidia's stock price closed at $877, the highest since April 12.

This week, Meta, Google parent company Alphabet, Microsoft, etc. announced financial reports, all betting heavily on AI and promising large-scale investment in artificial intelligence.

Analysts believe that the future belongs to artificial intelligence. If each of the biggest companies in the world were to invest 10 billion dollars in this field, Nvidia would definitely be the biggest winner:

• Bank of America analysts commented that first-quarter reports from major US mega-companies, such as Google, Microsoft, and Meta, showed that there was significant room for capital expenditure to rise in 2024, mainly driven by the construction of artificial intelligence infrastructure.

• Industry insiders say, if you look at the budgets and capital expenses of all the giants, where are they concentrated? That's definitely Nvidia because they have the best chips.

It is also Nvidia's “lie back and win” logic mentioned above. Although it hasn't released financial reports this week, the “win is like an announcement”. The performance is impressive. It is more impressive than tech giants such as Tesla (14% +) and Google's parent company Alphabet (11% +), which skyrocketed after this week's earnings report was announced.

However, the performance of big tech companies is uncertain. For example, first-quarter results were equally strong, with Alphabet and Microsoft surging, while Meta hit hard. The reason behind this is that AI investment has begun to bring huge benefits to Google and Microsoft, but it is more like a heavy burden for Meta's performance, starting to accelerate the pace of “burning money”, and AI has a long way to go to monetise.

This week, not just Nvidia, the “water seller” semiconductor sector of the AI competition is rising. Chip stocks accelerated their upward trend on Friday after generally reversing the market on Thursday. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index and semiconductor industry ETF SOXX closed up 2.6% and 2.1% respectively, rising for five consecutive days and outperforming the US stock market on the 2nd. On the 2nd, they broke the closing high since Tuesday, April 16, and climbed about 10% and 9.3%, respectively, this week, leveling off last week's decline of at least 9%. Compared with that, the S&P 500 index has accumulated a cumulative increase of 2.6% this week, and the NASDAQ 100 has accumulated a cumulative increase of nearly 4%.

edit/ruby