SAN FRANCISCO, May 8, 2026, 08:04 PDT
Nvidia shares rose 1.9% to $215.46 in early Friday trading, extending a rebound that followed fresh AI-infrastructure deals with Corning and IREN. The stock opened at $213.24 and touched $217.75 intraday, after Investing.com tied Thursday’s gain to the Corning partnership and stronger sentiment across chip names.
The move matters because investors are treating Nvidia as more than a seller of graphics processors, or GPUs, the chips that perform the parallel math used to train and run AI models. Corning’s role is in optical connectivity — fiber and photonics links that move data among thousands of processors inside large data centers — and Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang called AI the “largest infrastructure buildout of our time,” while Corning CEO Wendell Weeks called it “a manufacturing story.” Corning
A second deal put the same theme on the cloud side. Nvidia agreed to invest up to $2.1 billion in IREN as part of a broader plan to deploy as much as 5 gigawatts of AI infrastructure, with IREN issuing Nvidia a five-year right to buy up to 30 million shares at $70 each.
The Corning agreement is not just a supply contract. Huang said Nvidia made “a multi-billion-dollar prepayment” to help fund new Corning factories, separate from a disclosed equity stake that could rise to $3.2 billion, Reuters reported. Reuters
IREN also said it signed a five-year, $3.4 billion AI cloud services contract with Nvidia for internal AI and research workloads at its Childress, Texas campus. Co-CEO Daniel Roberts said the contract showed IREN could provide “fully managed cloud solutions,” not just bare metal, or raw server access. IREN
Corning, for its part, raised its long-term growth targets, saying it expects a $20 billion annualized sales run rate by the end of 2026 and a 19% compound annual growth rate from late 2026 through 2030. Chief Financial Officer Ed Schlesinger pointed to long-term customer agreements and “risk-sharing arrangements” as part of the plan. Corning
The buying came in a firmer market. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq touched record highs on Friday, helped by Nvidia and other large technology stocks, after U.S. jobs data eased concern about a sharper slowdown; Sam Stovall of CFRA Research said the report confirmed a “solid labor market.” Reuters
The competitive backdrop is still shifting. AMD shares hit a record this week after a strong outlook tied to AI-infrastructure demand, and analysts continue to view it as Nvidia’s closest challenger in AI chips, even as Nvidia keeps the dominant position in high-end accelerators. JonesTrading’s Michael O’Rourke put it simply: “Success invites competition.” Reuters
Nvidia’s next scheduled earnings report is May 20 at 2 p.m. Pacific time. The company has guided for fiscal first-quarter revenue of $78 billion, plus or minus 2%, and said its outlook assumes no China data-center compute revenue, a key caveat for investors watching export limits.
Valuation is where the story gets less clean. A Simply Wall St community narrative published Thursday put Nvidia’s fair value at $167 a share and framed the stock as priced between a base case and a bull case, with risks including China restrictions, custom silicon from large cloud customers and pressure from AMD.
A Yahoo Finance-syndicated Insider Monkey article also reflected the bear case now circulating around the stock: hyperscaler spending could plateau, returns on AI investment remain debated, and cloud giants are building their own chips. The piece cited export limits, valuation and possible tariff pressure as additional concerns.
The risk paragraph is not theoretical. Reuters reported Friday that a firm linked to Thailand’s national AI initiative was suspected of helping route servers containing advanced Nvidia chips toward China, while Nvidia said it expects partners to comply with export rules. Separately, IREN’s latest update showed a quarterly net loss and flagged execution, financing, power and hardware-supply risks, even as it signed the Nvidia agreements.
