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It’s been a brutal year for those betting against Nvidia Corp.’s stock, and the pain got worse Thursday.
Short sellers incurred $2.2 billion in mark-to-market losses on their Nvidia
NVDA,
positions in Thursday’s session alone, according to data from S3 Partners, as Nvidia shares ran up 24% in the session on the heels of a staggering outlook.
See more: Short sellers are not evil, but they are misunderstood
Nvidia shorts are down an estimated $8 billion so far this year, according to S3 director Matthew Unterman, who told MarketWatch that “unsurprisingly,” Nvidia has been the top loss-making short play on a year-to-date basis—by a wide margin. Tesla Inc.
TSLA,
ranks second in driving $5.8 billion in paper losses, while Apple Inc.
AAPL,
ranks third at $5 billion.
Nvidia shares are up 164% so far in 2023. They’re up 23.3% thus far this week and on track to record their best weekly percentage gain since a stretch in November 2016, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
It wasn’t too long ago that Wall Street had concerns about both Nvidia’s data-center business and its gaming business. But shares have shot up 244% from their 52-week low achieved in mid-October, a rally that reflected building optimism about the company’s potential to benefit from the rush to build out artificial-intelligence tools.
That hype translated into real numbers Wednesday when Nvidia gave a massive forecast for $11 billion in quarterly revenue, fueled by heavy demand for AI products.
Read: ‘Ride the Nvidia wave.’ Wall Street says the ‘undeniably pricey’ stock can keep roaring
“Generative AI is driving exponential growth in compute requirements and a fast transition to Nvidia accelerated computing,” Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said on the company’s earnings call.
The company’s outlook factors in “a steep increase in demand related to generative AI and large-language models,” she continued. “This demand has extended our data-center visibility out a few quarters, and we have procured substantially higher supply for the second half of the year.”
Nvidia CFO on record-breaking forecast: ‘The inflection point of AI is here’
