Nvidia shares rose 5% to a record high on Tuesday. Here’s why.

This article first appeared on our US website.

Shares of Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) rose 5% on Tuesday to an all-time high of US$201.03. This increase brings the share of the technology leader in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) to an annual gain of 49.7%. For context: the S&P500 The index has delivered a return of 18.4% over this period.

Tuesday’s gains come as Nvidia announced a slew of new products and partnerships at the GTC Washington event. This is the first time the company is holding a GTC (or GPU Technology Conference) in the nation’s capital. Held annually in March in Silicon Valley, the GTC is widely regarded as the world’s leading AI event.

Here’s what investors need to know.

Nvidia partners with Nokia and invests $1 billion in the Finnish telecom sector

Nvidia announced a lot of news at GTC Washington on Tuesday that investors certainly liked. And the news that probably contributed the most to the share’s rise is the partnership with the Finnish telecommunications and information technology company Nokia (NYSE: NOK).

This strategic partnership also involves Nvidia investing $1 billion in Nokia. The goal of the partnership is to accelerate the development and deployment of next-generation AI-native mobile networks and AI network infrastructure.

More specifically, according to the announcement, Nokia will add Nvidia’s “commercial AI-RAN products” to its “leading RAN portfolio, enabling communications service providers to launch AI-native 5G-Advanced and 6G networks on Nvidia platforms.”

While 5G is the fifth and current generation of wireless network technology, RAN stands for Radio Access Network. A radio connection is used Connect user devices, such as smartphones, to the mobile network. This partnership should help boost Nvidia’s sales by expanding the total addressable market.

And nNaturally, Nokia investors loved the news the largest player in AI technology partnered with and invested in their company. Telecom shares rose 22.8% on Tuesday.

Nvidia has been making big stock investments lately

Nvidia is starting to look more and more like an AI exchange-traded fund (ETF), as it has recently made a number of large investments in publicly traded and private companies.

Perhaps most notably, Nvidia announced in late September a strategic partnership with OpenAI, the AI ​​model developer behind the incredibly popular ChatGPT chatbot. The partners plan to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems for OpenAI’s next-generation AI infrastructure. And Nvidia plans to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI.

In mid-September, Nvidia announced a partnership with the chipmaker Intel to jointly develop customized data center and personal computer (PC) products, including AI chips. And Nvidia said it planned to invest $5 billion in Intel stock.