NEW YORK, June 18, 2026, 16:43 EDT
- Nvidia finished roughly 2.8% higher near $210, giving the chipmaker a market value of about $5.1 trillion.
- The Nasdaq Composite gained 1.9% to 26,517.93, while the S&P 500 rose 1.1% to 7,500.58. U.S. markets will be closed Friday for Juneteenth.
- Nvidia’s $25 billion, seven-part bond sale settled Thursday, raising about $24.92 billion before expenses.
Nvidia shares climbed nearly 3% on Thursday, ending near $210 as semiconductor stocks rebounded from the previous session’s Federal Reserve-driven selloff. “All together, the package of data is still supportive whether or not the Fed has become a little bit more hawkish,” said Tony Welch, chief investment officer at SignatureFD. Investing.com
The move matters because Nvidia’s valuation assumes artificial-intelligence spending will keep spreading beyond the largest U.S. cloud operators, often called hyperscalers. At the VivaTech gathering in Paris, Europe’s push for “sovereign AI” — local control over data, models and computing — dominated discussion even as the region remains reliant on U.S. technology. IBM senior vice president Ana Paula Assis said sovereignty was “about having control where it matters — not where the technology is from.” Reuters
Nvidia said French AI developer Mistral’s first deployment at a 44-megawatt data centre was operating with 18,000 GB200 systems. It also pointed to Mistral’s target of 200 megawatts of European capacity by 2027 and a planned 1.4-gigawatt AI campus — an “AI factory,” or a data centre built mainly to train and run AI models. NVIDIA Blog
Those projects are not booked revenue guidance, and much of the capacity will take years to build. Still, they suggest Europe could become another leg of demand rather than merely a substitute for U.S. spending. Publicis chairman Maurice Lévy called for a 100 billion-euro regional AI fund, saying: “There is a need to create a fund at a European scale.” Reuters
The buying was not confined to Nvidia. Intel surged about 10.6% after President Donald Trump said Apple had agreed to work with the chipmaker on U.S. chip design and manufacturing; Micron gained about 8.6% and Advanced Micro Devices rose roughly 4.7%.
Nvidia’s financing also remained in focus. The company sold $25 billion of unsecured bonds — debt not backed by specific assets — in seven sets with maturities running through 2056. Investor orders reached $85 billion, and Reuters reported that the main aim was to establish a liquid benchmark for Nvidia’s borrowing cost rather than finance near-term capital spending.
The transaction follows another sharp expansion in Nvidia’s operating results. First-quarter revenue rose 85% to $81.6 billion, while data-centre revenue increased 92% to $75.2 billion. Nvidia forecast second-quarter revenue of $91 billion, plus or minus 2%, while assuming no data-centre computing revenue from China.
But the trade carries clear risks. Europe’s sovereignty campaign could expand the total market while steering some public procurement toward local suppliers, and large data-centre projects can slip because of power, permits or financing. A renewed oil shock or a firmer Fed path would also increase the rate investors use to value future profits, potentially pressuring highly valued chip shares; markets continued to price possible U.S. rate increases after Thursday’s rally.
Nvidia’s next scheduled company event is its virtual annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday, June 24, at 9 a.m. Pacific time. Investors will listen for any fresh detail on capital deployment, European expansion and access to China, though the meeting notice did not promise an operating update.
