Global tech stocks climb as Nvidia results spark relief rally soothing AI bubble concerns
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.
‘Phenomenal growth’
Dan Hanbury, global equity portfolio manager at Ninety One, which holds Nvidia as its second-largest holding in its global strategic equity fund, cautiously welcomed Nvidia’s share price jump in Thursday’s premarket trade.
“As a holder, it’s great to see an early positive reaction but of course as we know those reactions can reverse further into the day,” Hanbury told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe.”
“Our reading of the numbers is they are very strong. Clearly, we can get caught up in the quarterly noise of a company like this but if we just put those [numbers] in context … only three years ago they were delivering $15 billion of data center revenue, we’re now looking at consensus forecasts into next year of $280 billion,” Hanbury said. “That is phenomenal growth that these guys are delivering.”
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?”
‘Nowhere near as bad as 1999’
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
Direxion signage at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, US, on Monday, Dec. 22, 2025. The holiday-shortened week started with gains in stocks amid a broad advance that saw a continuation of the bullish momentum on Wall Street.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Motive, a company with software for managing corporate trucks and drivers, on Tuesday filed for an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “MTVE.”
The paperwork puts Motive among a fast-growing group of tech companies looking to go public in 2026. Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX have all reportedly considered making their shares widely available for trading next year.
Motive is smaller, reporting a $62.7 million net loss on $115.8 million in revenue in the third quarter. The loss widened from $41.3 million in the same quarter of 2024, while revenue grew about 23% year over year. The company had almost 100,000 clients at the end of September.
Ryan Johns, Obaid Khan and Shoaib Makani started Motive in 2013, originally under the name Keep Truckin. Makani, the CEO, is Khan’s brother-in-law.
Investors include Alphabet’s GV, Base10 Partners, Greenoaks, Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and Scale Venture Partners.
Motive’s AI Dashcam device for detecting unsafe driving “has prevented 170,000 collisions and saved 1,500 lives on our roads,” Makani wrote in a letter to investors. Most revenue comes from subscriptions, although Motive does sell replacement hardware and professional services.
The San Francisco company changed its name to Motive in 2022, and as of Sept. 30, it employed 4,508 people. Motive employs 400 full-time data annotators who apply labels that are meant to enhance artificial intelligence models.
Motive has ongoing patent-infringement litigation with competitor Samsara, which went public in 2021 and today has a $22 billion market capitalization.
WATCH: AI IPO boom next year? The changing 2026 IPO landscape
Technology
Why an analyst sees Meta shares getting back to record highs – plus, another tariff reprieve
A silicon wafer with chips etched into is seen as U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris tours a site where Applied Materials plans to build a research facility, in Sunnyvale, California, U.S., May 22, 2023.
Pool | Reuters
The U.S. will increase tariffs on Chinese semiconductor imports in June 2027, at a rate to be determined at least a month in advance, the Trump administration said in a Federal Register filing on Tuesday.
But in the meantime, the initial tariff rate on semiconductor imports from China will be zero for 18 months, according to the filing from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.
As part of an investigation that kicked off a year ago, the agency found that China is engaging in unfair trade practices in the industry.
“For decades, China has targeted the semiconductor industry for dominance and has employed increasingly aggressive and sweeping non-market policies and practices in pursuing dominance of the sector,” the office said in the filing.
The decision to delay new tariffs for at least 18 months signals that the Trump administration is seeking to cool any trade hostilities between the U.S. and China.
Additional tariffs could also become a bargaining chip if future talks break down.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping reached a truce in the so-called trade war in October, as part of a deal that included the U.S. slashing some tariffs and China allowing exports of rare earth metals.
The USTR’s Tuesday filing states that tariffs will increase on June 23, 2027.
The notice is the next step in a process focusing on older chips that started during the Biden administration under Section 301 of the Trade Act.
The new 2027 date gives clarity to American firms that have said they are closely watching how U.S. tariffs could affect their businesses or supply chains.
The tariffs are separate from other duties threatened by the Trump administration on Chinese chip imports under Section 232 of the law.
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