Global tech stocks rallied Thursday as investors piled back into AI-related names, buoyed by Nvidia earnings.

Nvidia topped forecasts for revenue, which jumped 62% to $57.01 billion year-on-year, and issued stronger-than-expected fourth-quarter sales guidance, giving investors the confidence they were looking for to continue placing bets on the AI industry. Shares were 5% higher in premarket trade.

In Europe, Dutch semiconductor firms BESI and ASMI moved up over 3% and 2% in the first hours of trading, respectively. ASML, which makes critical equipment for semiconductors, gained 2.1%.

Asia-listed stocks Samsung Electronics and Hon Hai Precision Industry, also known as Foxconn, climbed 3.5% and 3.3% higher, respectively.

Stateside, investors flocked to tech stocks in premarket trade: AMD rose 5%, Arm gained almost 4%, Micron Technology advanced 2.7%, Marvell Technology added 3.3%, Broadcom was last seen 3.1% up and Intel moved 2% higher.

Karen McCormick, chief investment officer at London-based venture capital company Beringea, spoke with CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” about some of the recent moves to bulk-up on AI and scale, particularly following Nvidia and Microsoft‘s recent push to invest up to $15 billion in OpenAI rival Anthropic.

“It’s always a little bit intimidating to contradict Jensen Huang right after he has made phenomenal earnings results but in terms of the almost incestuousness of the valley and the AI companies, it is more than we have seen in the past,” McCormick said.

“I mean, if you think about traditionally, we might have called something like this vendor financing, where your vendor is helping to support the business,” McCormick said. “In this case we are just doing it with hundreds of billions of dollars and the ecosystem itself is now so intertwined that it’s almost a little bit nerve-wracking because if we are in a bubble and if any of that bubble bursts, what is going to happen to all of the related businesses?”

The culmination of circular dealmaking, debt issuances and high valuations added pressure to the market ahead of Nvidia’s much-anticipated results, despite other Big Tech firms posting solid quarterly earnings.

“The flip side to that is that each of them has incredibly robust balance sheets and incredibly robust investors, who may not let them fail either way,” McCormick said.

Quilter Cheviot’s global head of technology research and investment strategist Ben Barringer, added that Nvidia’s valuation isn’t “particularly excessive.”

Valuations aren’t that streteched when you look at the core big tech companies, he told CNBC’s “Europe Early Edition” on Thursday.

In terms of debt that’s also at the peripheral, he said. While Meta and Amazon have raised debt, “they’re still net cash positioned,” Barringer added.

“I think it’s more about them managing their treasury position and managing their balance sheet, as it were. Yes, it’s not great that they are doing some of this capex from debt, but it’s nowhere near as bad as 1999 where these were very heavily levered telecom companies doing a lot of this capex.”

However, Gil Luria, head of technology research at D.A. Davidson, told CNBC on Thursday that Nvidia is not a bubble barometer. “The concern is about companies raising a lot of debt to build data centers,” he said.

“Any concerns about Nvidia were certainly laid to rest [with Nvidia’s earnings], but that doesn’t mean that we don’t need to keep an eye on companies lending or borrowing to build data centers,” Luria added.

— CNBC’S Sam Meredith contributed to this report

Shares in AI darling Nvidia popped in premarket trade after the U.S. firm beat expectations in third-quarter results after the closing bell on Wednesday.

Shares were last trading 5.5% higher at 4:15 a.m. ET.

Nvidia topped forecasts for revenue, which jumped 62% to $57.01 billion year-on-year, and issued stronger-than-expected fourth-quarter sales guidance.

“There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told investors on an earnings call, as the firm set out its view of the industry. “From our vantage point, we see something very different.”

Quilter Cheviot’s Ben Barringer, who is the global head of technology research and investment strategist, told CNBC’s “Europe Early Edition” that Nvidia brought relief in two-parts: it beat gross margins, which is important for semiconductor stocks, but the firm also addressed market concerns head-on in its earnings call.

“They really went through and sort of tried to disprove pretty much all of the bear cases out there. They talked about scaling laws, they talked about all the different elements of demand, not just hyperscaler capex, but the model demand that they’re seeing from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, software demand, enterprise demand, sovereign AI,” Barringer said.

Nvidia also addressed supply constraints, vendor financing, partnerships and China. “So they really did a stand up job of calling out every elephant in the room, every every possible bear case, and going through and giving their perspective on it,” Barringer added.

Nvidia’s upbeat guidance helped lift investor sentiment around the AI trade, which has weakened in recent sessions amid fears about elevated valuations, debt financing and potential chip depreciation. The results boosted a slew of stocks across the AI ecosystem in the after-hours session, including chipmakers Advanced Micro Devices and Broadcom and power infrastructure companies such as Eaton.

Asia chip stocks also rallied on Thursday, with Samsung Electronics and Hon Hai Precision Industry, also known as Foxconn, leading gains.

— CNBC’s Pia Singh contributed to this report.

BEIJING — Chinese robotaxi companies are expanding abroad at a faster clip than U.S. rivals Waymo and Tesla — at a time when industry leaders say autonomous driving is finally near an inflection point.

“I think robotaxi has reached a tipping point, both here in China and in the U.S.,” Baidu CEO Robin Li said Tuesday on an earnings call, according to a FactSet transcript.

“There are enough people who have [had the] chance to experience driverless rides, and the word of mouth has created positive social media feedback,” he said, noting that the wider public exposure could speed up regulatory approval.

His comments echoed similar notes of optimism in the last few weeks from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Xpeng Co-President Brian Gu — who reversed his previously cautious stance after faster-than-anticipated tech advances. Xpeng is launching robotaxis in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou next year.

It’s a global market with significant growth potential, likely worth more than $25 billion by 2030, according to Goldman Sachs’ estimates in May.

To seize that opportunity, Chinese companies are aggressively expanding overseas and claim they are close to making robotaxis a viable business, rather than simply burning cash to grab market share.

In the last 18 months, Baidu, Pony.ai and WeRide landed partnerships with Uber that allow users of the ride-hailing app to order a robotaxi in specific locations, starting in the Middle East.

Such tie-ups “will be critical to success” as they enable robotaxi companies to operate more efficiently and reach profitability more quickly, said Counterpoint Senior Analyst Murtuza Ali.

That means ridership is enough to offset a Wuhan taxi fare that’s 30% cheaper than in Beijing or Shanghai, and far below prices in the U.S. or Europe. Besides developing autonomous driving systems, Baidu has also produced electrically-powered robotaxi vehicles — without relying on a third-party manufacturer — that are 50% cheaper.

“Once we can generate profit for every single car in a second-tier city [like Wuhan] in mainland China, we can generate profits in lots of cities across the world,” Halton Niu, general manager for Apollo Go’s overseas business, told CNBC.

“Scale matters,” he said. “If you only deploy, for example, 100 to 200 cars in a single city, if you only cover a small area of the city, you can never become profitable.”

Scale remains the dividing line. In the U.S., Alphabet-owned Waymo operates more than 2,500 vehicles and is expanding rapidly from major cities in California to Texas and Florida, with plans to enter London next year, following its first overseas venture in Tokyo.

Tesla sells its electric cars in China, and reportedly showed off its Cybercab in Shanghai this month. But it began testing its robotaxis in Texas only in June, and this week obtained a permit to operate in Arizona.

Amazon’s Zoox is also ramping up its expansion in the U.S., but has not released overseas plans.

The three companies have not disclosed plans to break even on their robotaxis.

Baidu Apollo Go’s Niu did not rule out an expansion into the U.S. But for now, the robotaxi operator plans to enter Europe with trials in parts of Switzerland next month, following their expansion in the Middle East this year.

Abu Dhabi last week gave Apollo Go a permit to charge fares to the public for fully driverless robotaxi rides, which are operated locally under the AutoGo brand, eight months after local trials began in parts of the city.

But Chinese startup WeRide said it received a similar permit on Oct. 31 to charge fares for its fully driverless robotaxi rides in Abu Dhabi, and claimed that removing human staff from the cars would allow it to make a profit on each vehicle.

That puts Pony.ai furthest from profitability among the three major Chinese robotaxi operators. Its CFO Leo Haojun Wang told The Wall Street Journal in mid-September that the company aimed to make a profit on each car by the end of this year or early next year.

Pony.ai plans to launch a fully autonomous commercial robotaxi business in Dubai in 2026, after receiving a testing permit in late September. The company plans to roll out in Europe in the coming months and has also outlined an expansion into Singapore.

Pony.ai and WeRide are set to release quarterly earnings early next week.

“Currently, companies like Waymo, Baidu, WeRide and Pony.ai are leading in terms of fleet size, which positions them advantageously in the race for profitability,” said Yuqian Ding, head of China Autos Research at HSBC.

Fleet size is becoming a competitive marker. Pony.ai reportedly said it plans to release 1,000 robotaxis in the Middle East by 2028, while WeRide aims to operate a fleet of 1,000 robotaxis in the region by the end of next year.

Niu said Apollo Go operates around 100 robotaxis in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and plans to double its vehicle fleet in the next few months.

“Apollo Go has had a head start with significantly more test rides than the other two,” Kai Wang, Asia equity market strategist at Morningstar, said in an email. “The more testing and data you can collect from trips taken, the more likely the AI sensors are able to recognize the objects on the road, which means better safety as well.”

He cautioned that despite some initial progress, the robotaxi race remains uncertain as “no one has truly had mass adoption for their vehicles.”

Coverage remains limited. Even in China, robotaxis are only allowed to operate in selected zones, though Pony.ai recently became the first to win regulatory approval to operate its robotaxis across all of Shenzhen, dubbed China’s Silicon Valley. In Beijing, self-driving taxis are mostly limited to a suburb called Yizhuang.

Anecdotally, CNBC tests have found Pony.ai offered a smoother ride than Apollo Go, which was prone to hard braking.

As for safety — which is critical for regulatory approval — none of the six operators has reported fatalities or major injuries caused by the robotaxis so far. But Apollo Go and Waymo have begun advertising low airbag deployment rates.

Even if that’s not enough to convince regulators worldwide, Beijing is expected to ramp up support at home.

HSBC’s Ding predicts the number of robotaxis on China’s roads could multiply from a few thousand to tens of thousands between the end of this year and 2026, a shift that would give operators more proof that their model works.