Nvidia and Microsoft are soaring as tech analysts keep releasing optimistic calls on the sector

Nvidia’s stock posted a fifth consecutive day of gains Friday.

Tech stocks have led the market’s recovery from April lows — and this week, Wall Street continued eyeing new milestones for major names.

Shares of Nvidia Corp. climbed 9.7% this week, with the stock closing Friday at a new all-time high of $157.75. The chip maker has gained about $1.42 trillion since its lowest close so far this year in April, according to Dow Jones Market Data. The comeback also helped Nvidia regain its position from Microsoft Corp. this week as the most valuable public company in the world.

As of Friday’s market close, Nvidia was sitting on a market capitalization of $3.85 trillion — up 61.8% since the S&P 500’s recent low on April 8, according to Dow Jones Market Data — after posting five consecutive days of gains. Microsoft, meanwhile, has hit a $3.69 trillion market valuation and is up 40% from its April low, the data showed.

Both companies are closing in on the “monumental achievement” of a $4 trillion market cap, Wedbush analysts led by Dan Ives said in a note to clients on Friday. The analysts see Nvidia and Microsoft reaching the milestone this summer, then aiming for the $5 trillion mark over the next 18 months, “as this tech bull market is still early being led by the AI Revolution.”

“The poster [children] for the AI Revolution are led by Nvidia and Microsoft as both are foundational pieces of building on the biggest tech trend we have seen in our 25 years covering tech stocks on the Street,” the Wedbush team said. 

Wedbush sees Advanced Micro Devices Inc. joining Nvidia as a top provider of artificial-intelligence chips in the near term. The chip maker is among the S&P 500’s top performers since the April 8 low and was up 83.9% from that point as of Friday’s close, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

And while Microsoft has been a leader among hyperscalers in “this first key phase of the AI Revolution,” the analysts said that Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Amazon Web Services have also found “major cloud and AI momentum.”

But Wedbush’s expectations for Nvidia are trillions of dollars below what Loop Capital analyst Ananda Baruah laid out for the company in a note to clients earlier this week.

“We are entering the next ‘Golden Wave’ of Gen AI adoption and [Nvidia] is at the front end of another material leg of stronger-than-anticipated demand,” Baruah said in the note, according to Bloomberg. 

Baruah raised his price target on Nvidia from $175 to $250, which would translate to a $6 trillion valuation — or a gain of about 58% from its market cap on Friday.

Earlier this month, Barclays analysts were also bullish on Nvidia, raising their price target to $200 on an upbeat view of the chip maker’s ramp-up of its Blackwell AI platform. At that price, Nvidia would be looking at a $4.9 trillion market cap. Barclays said Nvidia “has the most potential upside in our coverage” for the second half of the year.

Meanwhile, Micron Technology Inc. has been among the S&P 500’s top performers so far this month, and ended Friday up 90.4% from the index’s April 8 closing low, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

The memory-chip maker’s May-quarter earnings results came in above Wall Street’s expectations on demand for its high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, which are needed by AI-chip developers.

Micron said its fiscal third-quarter revenue was “driven by all-time-high” sales of its dynamic random-access memory chips, including a nearly 50% sequential increase in revenue for its HBM chips.

With Nvidia’s next-generation Blackwell Ultra chips expected to come later this year or early next year, Mizuho Securities desk-based analyst Jordan Klein said in a pre-earnings note that “the HBM density rises materially,” which is good for Micron and other suppliers of HBM chips.