Nvidia inventory has continued its gorgeous rally this 12 months, sending the AI chip chief’s valuation previous $3 trillion and making it an excellent larger presence within the S&P 500.
In reality, 34.5% of the S&P 500’s market cap features thus far this 12 months might be attributed to Nvidia alone, in accordance with Apollo Chief Economist Torsten Sløk.
Shares have soared 166% within the 12 months so far and are up greater than 200% from this time a 12 months in the past. That’s as the substitute intelligence craze has gripped Wall Road, and Nvidia’s quarterly earnings present no signal that the frenzy to fill up on AI chips isn’t slowing down.
However relying a lot on one inventory additionally represents a giant danger, Sløk warned.
“Such a high concentration implies that if NVIDIA continues to rise, then things are fine,” he wrote in a notice on Wednesday. “But if it starts to decline, then the S&P 500 will be hit hard.”
As a result of the S&P 500 is weighted by market cap, even comparatively minor wobbles from behemoths like Nvidia, Apple, and Microsoft can transfer the needle on the broad inventory market index.
And as retail buyers more and more load up on S&P 500 index funds, which means publicity to Nvidia—for higher or for worse—is rising as nicely.
“The bottom line is that the extreme concentration of returns in the S&P 500 makes investors more vulnerable to single headlines impacting the one stock driving index returns,” Sløk added.
This isn’t the primary time he has sounded the alarm on the inventory market’s dependence on Huge Tech.
When Nvidia’s market cap topped $2 trillion for the primary time ever earlier this 12 months, Sløk in contrast tech valuations to the bubble seen throughout the dot-com period.
“The top 10 companies in the S&P 500 today are more overvalued than the top 10 companies were during the tech bubble in the mid-1990s,” he wrote on the time.
Others on Wall Road are additionally rising extra skeptical about Nvidia’s valuation and its attractiveness as an funding after the inventory’s epic rally.
However Nvidia inventory bulls stay. Beth Kindig, lead tech analyst on the I/O Fund, sees extra astronomical features within the coming years, predicting its market cap will surge greater than triple once more to $10 trillion by 2030.
In the meantime, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang continues to shock Wall Road, most lately by laying out a fast cadence of latest AI platforms.
Earlier this month, he mentioned Nvidia plans to improve its AI accelerators yearly as he introduced the Blackwell Extremely chip for 2025 and a next-generation platform in improvement known as Rubin for 2026.
