Nvidia Hits $4 Trillion Valuation as Blackwell GB200 Shipments Begin
Nvidia surpasses a $4 trillion market capitalization for the first time after confirming volume production of its Blackwell GB200 superchips started December 11. The milestone follows a 2,400 percent stock rise since the ChatGPT launch in 2022 and reflects immediate sell-out of 2026 GB200 capacity to hyperscalers. Shares closed at $163.92, adding $380 billion in value over the prior 48 hours.
The GB200 NVL72 racks, each containing 72 GPUs and delivering 1.4 exaFLOPs of FP4 inference, ship at $3.2 million per unit.
Microsoft, Google, and Meta locked in 450,000 racks combined for calendar 2026 delivery, representing roughly $1.44 trillion in committed spend. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure reserved an additional 80,000 units for sovereign AI deployments across 42 countries. Nvidia reports a 38-month order backlog despite expanding TSMC CoWoS-L packaging lines to 650,000 wafers monthly.
GB200 achieves 30× higher energy efficiency than the H100 on large-language-model inference, consuming 1,200 watts per tray while sustaining 720 teraFLOPs at FP8 precision. Liquid-cooled variants drop total rack power to 120 kilowatts versus 180 kilowatts for air-cooled H100 clusters. Early testing by xAI on the Memphis Colossus extension shows Grok 4 training runs 4.8× faster on GB200 than H200 hardware.
Jensen Huang stated during the December 12 earnings call that Blackwell manufacturing yield exceeded internal targets by 18 percent, enabling full ramp six weeks ahead of schedule. The company raised capital expenditure guidance to $72 billion for fiscal 2026, primarily for in-house testing farms and 2-nanometer test chips with TSMC. Gross margins expanded to 78.4 percent on mix shift toward Grace-Blackwell superchips priced 40 percent above Hopper equivalents.
Data-center revenue reached $35.6 billion for the quarter, up 112 percent year-over-year and beating estimates by $4.1 billion. Nvidia now commands 92 percent share of accelerator units shipped into cloud providers, per Omdia tracking. The firm introduced NVLink Fusion at 1.8 terabytes per second bidirectional bandwidth, allowing 576-GB200 clusters to operate as single logical GPUs for multi-trillion-parameter models.
Competitors AMD and Intel lag by at least 18 months on equivalent process geometry and packaging density. AMD’s MI355X, built on TSMC 4 nm, ships in limited quantities at 28× lower inference throughput per rack. Broadcom’s custom silicon for Google TPUs remains constrained to internal use, leaving Nvidia unchallenged in open-market supply.
Analysts project Nvidia revenue will exceed $210 billion in calendar 2025, surpassing Apple’s current annual run rate. The company holds $48 billion in cash against $9 billion long-term debt after repaying convertible notes early. Forward price-to-earnings settled at 41× 2026 estimates, down from 68× six months ago as earnings growth outpaced multiple contraction.
Supply chain sources confirm Samsung and SK Hynix HBM3E production lines run at 100 percent allocation to Nvidia through mid-2027. CoWoS-L capacity expansion at TSMC adds 200,000 units monthly by Q3 2026, yet remains fully booked. Nvidia implemented direct liquid cooling standards across all new designs, forcing data-center operators to retrofit facilities at $8 million per megawatt.
The $4 trillion threshold places Nvidia as the world’s most valuable company for 41 consecutive trading days. Investors now price in sustained 85 percent CAGR in data-center revenue through 2028, premised on continued AI infrastructure build-out and replacement cycles every 18 months. Blackwell Ultra, featuring 20 percent higher CUDA core density on TSMC 3 nm, tapes out in March for 2027 deployment.
