MW Nvidia's stock shoots toward best day since April as tech sector rebounds

By Emily Bary and Britney Nguyen

Nvidia's stock was on pace to break a five-day losing streak on Friday

Nvidia's stock was up almost 7% in Friday's midday action.

Nvidia's stock is poised to snap its five-day losing streak in a big way on Friday, with the shares on track for their biggest daily gain in nine months.

The technology sector in general was roaring back to life, with hardware-oriented stocks leading the way. Nvidia's stock (NVDA) was up almost 7% and Advanced Micro Devices' stock AMD was up 8%, while shares of Super Micro Computer $(SMCI)$ and Astera Labs (ALAB) were up even more.

If Nvidia's current increase holds through the close, the stock would log its largest one-day percentage increase since April 9, when it rose 18.7%, according to Dow Jones Market Data. A gain of any sort would snap Nvidia's longest losing streak since Sept. 3, when it fell for five straight trading days.

Amazon (AMZN) on Thursday afternoon became the last major cloud player to deliver its capital-expenditure forecast. The company expects to spend $200 billion this year, far more than Wall Street was expecting, and also more than what rivals plan to spend.

That money has to go somewhere, and chip suppliers look like prime beneficiaries, especially as cloud operators rush to add capacity.

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Even with Friday's big move, however, Nvidia shares are slightly down on the year.

"I think what you may be seeing there is that investors have probably made a lot of money in Nvidia," Melissa Otto, the head of Visible Alpha research at S&P Global, told MarketWatch.

She said investors may be finding fresher opportunities in memory stocks, which also benefit from the capital-expenditure boom but are seeing massive increases to forward estimates - resembling what happened with Nvidia's estimates several years ago.

Sandisk $(SNDK)$, Micron Technology $(MU)$ and Western Digital $(WDC)$ are plays on that trend. Their shares were all up on Friday and they remain among the S&P 500's SPX top performers for the year.

Mizuho trading-desk analyst Jordan Klein said that the market understands that demand for AI compute and spending on data-center components will continue to rise, not just in 2026 but into 2027.

And the race among tech giants to raise capex in support of AI efforts will accelerate, he noted, as AI proliferates into more applications and products that will increase demand for inference, or the process of running AI models.

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Even if supply is expanding for some critical data-center components, Klein said, it still won't be enough to keep up with larger orders that are piling up for beyond 2026.

The supply constraints are good news for sectors such as memory and storage, networking and hardware, Klein added, because companies can raise prices, helping gross margins. That makes for "valuable upward earnings revisions and surprises" in the future, he said.

-Emily Bary -Britney Nguyen

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February 06, 2026 12:31 ET (17:31 GMT)

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