Nvidia Pushes S&P 500 to Record High, While AI Powered Crypto Projects Surge on Utility Play

The AI market lit up across the board today. Nvidia’s record shattering quarter nudged the S&P 500 into fresh highs, startups are pulling in late stage capital like the bubble never burst, and in crypto, AI integrated tokens like NOVA and Pundi AI are getting real traction… not just hype. Here’s what moved and why it matters.

📈 AI Market Movers & Trends

Nvidia’s blowout earnings just punked every bear left on Wall Street. The chip kingpin posted another staggering quarter, extending its reign at the nexus of the AI gold rush and pulling the S&P 500 to an all time high in the process. While NVDA closed the day slightly lower (down 1.5%) as investors digested high expectations, the bigger picture remains bulletproof: year-to date, it’s up a blistering 85%.

CEO Jensen Huang didn’t temper excitement either. On the call, he dubbed the AI boom “too big to wait,” while still telling customers to “pace their buildouts”… a deft flex signaling Nvidia’s supply pipeline will remain tight and strategically allocated.

Translation… scarcity is the new scale.

But let’s zoom out. Several AI linked stocks, from lesser-known infrastructure plays to niche software operators, basked in the Nvidia glow. In Japan, SoftBank surged 3.2% on speculation its chip design arm Arm could spike AI exposure. Meanwhile, China counterpunched quietly… Alibaba just unveiled a homegrown AI chip designed to fill its Nvidia deficit amid US export bans. Game on.

Still, not everyone soared. Dell and Affirm saw post-earnings pullbacks, a reminder that AI tailwinds don’t float all boats especially when margins and execution wobble. The bottom line is the AI trade is still red hot but increasingly picky. It’s no longer just “AI or not”… it’s “show me the moat.”

💸 Funding Watch

If late stage capital was supposed to be on life support in 2025, today said otherwise. Quietly but significantly, Series C and D rounds popped up across the AI landscape… mostly companies in the “boring but essential” layer of the stack.

Case in point, EdgeCore AI, a secure inference startup out of Toronto, closed a $110 million Series D today led by Coatue and SoftBank Vision Fund 2. Their value prop? Making LLMs not only faster but certifiably private for enterprise workloads.

It's technically dense, but investors clearly love the story. With regulatory knives circling AI privacy from both Europe and the US, EdgeCore smells like an exit candidate or at least a defensive play.

On the flip side, a Chinese unicorn, Anker AI (not to be confused with the electronics brand), quietly announced a pre-IPO round rumored to be in the $300M+ range. The firm’s pushing into AI native hardware for creators… think embedded vision, local model processing, the whole “Edge is eating the Cloud” thesis. ByteDance and Temasek are big in the round, which tells you the geopolitics of AI supply chains are now venture cap tables, too.

Worth noting, some of today’s funding activity lines up eerily with this year’s M&A whisper list. The shakeout in AI software platforms continues, and founders aren’t hiding it. One VC we spoke with this week said the new memo is “pick a trench or get rolled over.” AI’s messy middle layer is due for consolidation, and capital is rushing to stabilize the survivors.

🪙 Crypto Moves

The crypto AI crossover isn’t cooling… it’s calcifying into real infrastructure. Two major projects… NOVA and Pundi AI… made noise today with moves that blur the line between blockchain speculation and actual AI utility.

NOVA grabbed headlines by launching a decentralized identity layer powered by AI… think KYC meets GPT. It’s purpose built for platforms dealing in micropayments, decentralized social, or digital influence scores (hello, Worldcoin competitors). But unlike past vaporware, NOVA’s tech stack has real usage among Solana-native devs already. Sources say there's “strong validator interest” cropping up… and in 2025, that's about as bullish as it gets.

Meanwhile, Pundi AI inked a deal with THENA Finance to bring its AI data aggregation tools to BNB Chain. Their angle? Creating a marketplace for inference outputs… a sort of API mall for model results. It was enough to spike Pundi AI’s token 17% in 24 hours, and more interestingly, THENA’s TVL saw a $9.1M inflow post-announcement. That’s a strong signal… traders are betting this isn’t just another AI narrative pump.

Underneath all this activity is a larger theme… “AI liquidity.” While ETH based L2s are still the infrastructure darlings, the next wave of crypto utility may come from monetizing model outputs cross-chain whether that’s compliance data, voice generation snippets, or synthetic agents. And as AI Floodgates open on the regulatory front, demand for privacy and provenance solutions (like NOVA) is only going to rise.

Don’t sleep on this… the AI crypto fusion isn’t just about co-branded tokens… it’s about who controls the data economy underneath the surface.