AI Daily: Nvidia becomes first $5 trillion company as AI boom powers rally

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly:

$5 TRILLION MARKET CAP: Nvidia (NVDA) rallies as it becomes first company to reach a $5 trillion market cap as AI boom fuels rally. This new milestone comes just three months after Nvidia surpassed the $4 trillion mark.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump said he plans to discuss Nvidia’s advanced Blackwell AI chip with Chinese President Xi Jinping during their upcoming meeting, as U.S. restrictions on AI chip sales to China, formerly 13% of Nvidia’s revenue, remain a major point of tension in ongoing trade talks, Reuters’ Trevor Hunnicutt and Eduardo Baptista report.

AI PLATFORMS: Super Micro Computer (SMCI) is showcasing its advanced AI infrastructure solutions at Nvidia GTC in Washington, D.C. this week, highlighting systems tailored to meet the stringent requirements of federal customers. Supermicro announced its plans to deliver next-generation Nvidia AI platforms, including the Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL144 and Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL144 CPX in 2026. Additionally, Supermicro introduces U.S.-manufactured, TAA-compliant systems, including the high-density 2OU Nvidia HGX B300 8-GPU system with up to 144 GPUs per rack and an expanded portfolio featuring a Super AI Station based on Nvidia GB300 and the new rack-scale Nvidia GB200 NVL4 HPC solutions. “Our expanded collaboration with NVIDIA and our focus on U.S.-based manufacturing position Supermicro as a trusted partner for federal AI deployments. With our corporate headquarters, manufacturing, and R&D all based in San Jose, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, we have an unparalleled ability and capacity to deliver first-to-market solutions are developed, constructed, validated (and manufactured) for American federal customers,” said Charles Liang, president and CEO, Supermicro. “The result of many years of working hand-in-hand with our close partner NVIDIA-also based in Silicon Valley-Supermicro has cemented its position as a pioneer of American AI infrastructure development.”

AI SUPERCOMPUTER: Eli Lilly (LLY) announced it is building “the most powerful supercomputer owned and operated by a pharmaceutical company,” in collaboration with Nvidia. The supercomputer will power an “AI factory,” a specialized computing infrastructure that manages the entire AI lifecycle from data ingestion and training to fine-tuning and high-volume inference. The supercomputer is the world’s first Nvidia DGX SuperPOD with DGX B300 systems. It is powered by more than 1,000 B300 GPUs on a unified networking fabric, which means communication across GPUs, storage and related systems runs on just one high-speed network. The new supercomputer and AI factory enable rapid learning and iteration. Scientists will be able to train AI models on millions of experiments to test potential medicines, dramatically expanding the scope and sophistication of drug discovery efforts. A number of these proprietary AI models will be available on Lilly TuneLab, a collaborative federated AI/ML drug discovery platform created to expand access to advanced discovery tools across the biopharma ecosystem. TuneLab will continue evolving its suite of available models, including the addition of workflows that incorporate select Nvidia Clara open-source models. Beyond discovery, Lilly plans to leverage the supercomputer to shorten development cycles and help get medicines to people faster. New scientific AI agents can support researchers in reasoning, planning and collaborating across digital and physical environments. With advanced medical imaging, scientists benefit from a clearer view of how diseases progress and can develop new biomarkers for more personalized care. Manufacturing processes can benefit from digital twins together with Nvidia’s robotic technologies to improve production efficiency and reduce downtime.

GIGA-SCALE AI FACTORIES: Flex (FLEX) announced it is supporting the development of modular data center systems with Nvidia. The collaboration will leverage Flex’s advanced manufacturing capabilities and footprint to deliver high-performance, energy-efficient AI factories at scale, with an emphasis on meeting growing infrastructure demands in the U.S. “Flex is at the forefront of supporting data center operators to overcome escalating power, heat, and scale constraints of the AI era,” said Michael Hartung, president and chief commercial officer at Flex. “By combining Flex’s advanced manufacturing scale and systems integration expertise with Nvidia’s AI-driven platform leadership, we can transform data center infrastructure at rapid speed.”As part of its collaboration with Nvidia, Flex is deploying Nvidia cuOpt for capacity planning, route simulations, and process optimization in its facilities. The pilot will leverage digital twins that unify inventory, labor, and freight operations to streamline logistics across Flex’s worldwide network.

AI INTEGRATIONS: Synopsys (SNPS) said that, through collaboration with Nvidia, it is enhancing AI integrations for smarter manufacturing, chip design, and physics simulation, enabling AI and GPU-accelerated computing across engineering workloads – making engineering smarter, faster, and more intuitive. “The pace of engineering is accelerating despite increasing, systemic complexity – a testament to the incredible capability and performance gains that AI and GPU-acceleration are bringing across our portfolio,” said Shankar Krishnamoorthy, Chief Product Development Officer at Synopsys. “Synopsys is leading this transformation for our customers with pioneering AI capabilities and the industry’s broadest portfolio of GPU-accelerated products. Together with NVIDIA, we are a catalyst for next-generation engineering capabilities, velocity, and ingenuity.”

AI COMPUTING PORTFOLIO: HP Enterprise (HPE) announced an expanded Nvidia AI Computing by HPE portfolio, designed to make AI easier to deploy and scale across governments, regulated industries, and enterprises. The expanded offering helps organizations build secure, private AI infrastructure faster and more efficiently through turnkey AI factory solutions, unified data strategies, and refreshed server platforms featuring the latest NVIDIA AI infrastructure and software. “To accelerate widespread AI adoption in enterprises, technology must directly address the core challenges that organizations face around complex deployments and fragmented, highly sensitive data. Together with NVIDIA, we offer a different approach with full-stack, private AI factories that simplify operations and help enterprises and governments scale quickly while staying compliant,” said Fidelma Russo, executive vice president and general manager, Hybrid Cloud and CTO at HPE. “AI factories are the new infrastructure of the intelligence era – built to generate tokens of intelligence at massive scale,” said Justin Boitano, vice president, Enterprise Software at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA and HPE are building these full-stack systems – integrating NVIDIA Blackwell, NVIDIA networking software and AI Data Platform reference designs – to power agentic AI, unlock automation and accelerate digital transformation for every industry.”

AGENTIC CYBERSECURITY: Data Federal, a VAST Data subsidiary delivering the AI Operating System to the U.S. public sector’s defense, intelligence, and civilian agencies, announced a strategic partnership with Leidos (LDOS) to deliver a new, scalable model for cyber defense, which will be showcased live at NVIDIA GTC DC. Leidos, powered by Nvidia AI Enterprise software and the VAST AI Operating System, aims to deliver a solution that helps global enterprises and federal agencies move from alert overload to decisive, AI-orchestrated response. “At GTC DC, we’re showing what happens when data, models and agents operate as one system,” said Randy Hayes, Vice President, Public Sector at VAST Data. “With Leidos’ mission expertise, NVIDIA AI architecture and the VAST AI Operating System unifying data and orchestration, security teams can analyze years of telemetry instantly, surface hidden signals with vector search and let AI agents execute policy-driven responses – simplifying operations, accelerating outcomes and improving critical system security.”

CUSTOMIZABLE AI TO ENTERPRISE: Zoom Communications (ZM) announced that the company and Nvidia are working together to deliver “faster, higher-quality, and customizable AI to the enterprise. Zoom’s federated architecture expands to include Nvidia Nemotron open technologies to support AI Companion 3.0 across industries such as finance, healthcare, and government. This framework is expanding to a next-generation hybrid language model approach, a breakthrough AI architecture that can intelligently route queries between Zoom’s proprietary Small Language Models, optimized for low latency and quality for a particular skill or tasks, and a fine-tuned Large Language Model for complex reasoning. The new hybrid model will accelerate enterprise productivity and collaboration experiences with optimized cost efficiency, quality, and latency.” “We’ve increased our speed and enhanced lower-cost model decision making using Nvidia GPUs and AI software stack, helping to optimize AI Companion’s core capabilities and enable faster go-to-market timelines,” said X.D. Huang, chief technology officer at Zoom. “With the help of NVIDIA Nemotron open technologies, we’re accelerating the development of our enterprise retrieval-augmented generation capabilities, allowing AI Companion to work seamlessly with Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, Google Workspace, Slack, Salesforce, and ServiceNow. This partnership allows us to deliver powerful, security-focused, and scalable AI experiences to our customers at rapid speed.” 

SUPERCOMPUTERS: HP Enterprise (HPE) announced, in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy, National Nuclear Security Administration and Los Alamos National Laboratory, that it has been selected to deliver two state-of-the-art supercomputers, named “Mission” and “Vision”. The next-generation systems will be based on the new direct liquid-cooled HPE Cray Supercomputing GX5000 system and feature upcoming Nvidia Vera Rubin Superchips. Mission and Vision are part of the DOE’s $370M investment to accelerate scientific discovery, advance AI initiatives and strengthen national security. “For decades, HPE and Los Alamos National Laboratory have collaborated on innovative supercomputing designs that deliver powerful capabilities to solve complex scientific challenges and bolster national security efforts. We are proud to continue powering the lab’s journey with the upcoming Mission and Vision systems. These innovations will be among the first to feature next-generation HPE Cray supercomputing architecture to drive AI innovation and scientific impact,” said Trish Damkroger, senior vice president and general manager, HPC & AI Infrastructure Solutions at HPE.

DATA CENTER SWITCH: Cisco (CSCO) introduced “major” advancements to accelerate secure, scalable AI across market segments. Leading the announcements is the Cisco N9100, the first Nvidia partner-developed data center switch based on Nvidia Spectrum-X Ethernet switch silicon. With this switch, Cisco is offering Nvidia Cloud Partner-compliant reference architecture for neocloud and sovereign cloud deployments. For enterprise customers, Cisco Secure AI Factory with Nvidia, strengthens protection and visibility across AI deployments with new security and observability integrations. To pave the way for next-generation connectivity in the telecom industry, Cisco, Nvidia and additional partners unveiled the industry’s first AI-native wireless stack for 6G. Together, these innovations offer neocloud, enterprise, and telecom customers the flexibility and interoperability to efficiently build, manage and secure AI infrastructure at scale, the company said. “We’re at the beginning of the largest data center build-out in history,” said Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco. “The infrastructure that will power the agentic AI applications and innovation of the future requires new architectures designed to overcome today’s constraints in power, computing, and network performance. Together, Cisco and NVIDIA are leading the way in defining the technologies that will power these AI-ready data centers in all their varieties, from emerging neoclouds, to global service providers, to enterprises, and beyond.”

AI AGENTS: CrowdStrike (CRWD) “announced it is collaborating with NVIDIA to bring always-on, continuously learning AI agents for cybersecurity to the edge through Charlotte AI AgentWorks, NVIDIA Nemotron open models, NVIDIA NeMo Data Designer synthetic data, NVIDIA Nemo Agent Toolkit, and NVIDIA NIM microservices. Expanding CrowdStrike and NVIDIA’s work to build, power, and secure the agentic ecosystem, the latest collaboration will deliver autonomous, real-time AI agents that learn continuously and defend critical infrastructure across cloud, data-center, and edge environments. Bringing agents built with Charlotte AI AgentWorks and NVIDIA to the edge will enable organizations to deploy autonomous, continuously learning AI agents closer to where data is created – extending protection to data centers and controlled environments. By training NVIDIA Nemotron open models with data from CrowdStrike experts using NVIDIA NeMo Data Designer, customers will be able to fine-tune and optimize models for their own AI agents, built on CrowdStrike’s Agentic Security Platform. This joint innovation will enable enterprises to scale and accelerate security operations with local inference, continuously improving detection accuracy and real-time response to threats – helping to maintain control of sensitive data and align with regional sovereignty requirements.”

AUTONOMOUS FLIGHT: Joby Aviation (JOBY) announced a collaboration with Nvidia, marked by Nvidia’s selection of Joby as the only aviation launch partner for the new Nvidia IGX Thor platform. Powered by the Nvidia Blackwell architecture, the industrial-grade platform is designed to power the next generation of physical AI applications. This unique collaboration will advance development of Joby’s autonomous flight technology Superpilot across military and civil platforms. Joby is developing Superpilot to interact with the world through a continuum of autonomous functions. Nvidia’s support for industry recognized functional safety standards on the IGX Thor platform allows Joby to pursue certifiable autonomy for near-term defense and long-term civil applications as the Federal Aviation Administration advances the capabilities of national airspace.

STAYING IN CALIFORNIA: A few weeks ago, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told California Attorney General Rob Bonta he wanted the company to stay in California, a subtle threat that if Bonta prevented the company’s conversion to a more traditional company structure, OpenAI would leave the state, Keach Hagey and Berber Jin of The Wall Street Journal report. Atlman’s message was that he was committed to California and wouldn’t sue or leave it if his company’s plans weren’t thwarted. The discussion proved fruitful, ending an investigation by Bonta’s office.