$NVDA Nvidia May Reclaim the “Throne”

US tech giants’ stock prices are once again approaching record highs—and this time, Nvidia is clearly the player leading the bull market charge.

After falling conspicuously behind other surging semiconductor stocks earlier in 2026, Nvidia has recently begun reasserting its position as the “king of the AI trade.”
On Thursday, the first and largest US-listed ETF tracking the “Magnificent Seven”—the Roundhill Magnificent Seven ETF—surged nearly 2.5% to close at $70.43, approaching its record closing high of $70.94 set in May this year. The ETF holds equal-weight positions in the seven tech giants—Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Tesla—and rebalances quarterly.
In recent months, the “Magnificent Seven” stocks have shown clear divergence. Of the seven constituents, Nvidia and Apple are closest to their record highs, with both less than 3% below their all-time highs. Meanwhile, Alphabet, Meta, and Tesla have fallen by double digits from their record highs.
Nvidia’s stock has recently gained strong momentum, boosted by its robust earnings report last week. In its latest earnings report, the company said it expected revenue for the fiscal year ending January 2028 to grow by more than 70%.
Joe Tigay, portfolio manager at Equity Armor Investments, wrote in a report last week that the earnings results showed “the buildout of AI infrastructure remains endless.”
Overnight, Nvidia received its latest piece of good news with the announcement that it would acquire Hugging Face, a popular open-source AI developer platform. In a report on Thursday, Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst Jeff Pollard said the deal would help the chip giant gain greater control and visibility over the open-source software layer, thereby deepening Nvidia’s AI ecosystem.
Nvidia returns to the spotlight Nvidia’s market leadership once again marks a reversal in the industry landscape from earlier this year. At that time, as semiconductor stocks such as Micron Technology and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) drove the iShares Semiconductor ETF to a record high, Nvidia was left far behind. Some analysts speculated that Nvidia had become too large, and investors were seeking differentiated semiconductor plays.
Data shows that although the iShares PHLX Semiconductor ETF (SOXX) has risen 67% year to date, the semiconductor sector as a whole has recently significantly underperformed Nvidia as investors recalibrated their expectations for some fast-growing chip stocks. Over the past three months, Nvidia’s stock has risen 7%, while SOXX has fallen 18%.
Despite shifts in market sentiment and competition from rivals, Nvidia has once again demonstrated its irreplaceability in the AI wave through strong earnings expectations and strategic reinforcement of the open-source ecosystem. As hardware infrastructure buildout continues and the software ecosystem matures, whether Nvidia can lead the “Magnificent Seven” to new highs will become a key indicator of the direction of US tech stocks. $NVDA