It’s funny how the Nvidia narrative changed when the S&P pushed higher to notch a(nother) new record on Thursday.

In the immediate aftermath of the company’s report on Wednesday evening, the mainstream financial media was circumspect.

Not because anyone was truly concerned about the slightest of misses for Jensen Huang’s Data Center sales. Nor because anyone seriously believed Nvidia’s revenue guide for the current quarter — which was only “disappointing” by reference to the highest analyst estimates; relative to the bullish outliers — presaged something ominous about demand for AI equipment.

Rather, the cautious cadence evident across real-time analysis of Nvidia’s report was a function of the after-hours move in the shares which, if sustained during Thursday’s cash session, might’ve knocked the S&P off its record. Better to go ahead and call the quarter underwhelming just in case spoiled markets decided to frown at a $4.5 trillion company growing sales at 55%. (And do take a moment to marvel at that.)

For my part, I called the results “fine.” “Nothing suggests demand’s anything other than robust for Huang’s products,” I wrote, on the way to a cheap monopoly quip.

Fast forward to Thursday and although the shares were lower, it wasn’t enough to undercut the benchmark.

As the S&P ticked up, the narrative changed. Nvidia’s results, which less than 24 hours previous were tentative evidence of waning demand, instead “validate[d] the AI boom,” to quote one outlet.

Analysts were undeterred, that’s for sure. Regardless of any near-term “slowdown” (and as discussed here on Wednesday evening, “slowdown” is a relative term when it comes to Nvidia), the outlook’s positive. A dozen banks and shops lifted price targets. Most see the shares eclipsing $200.

The figure on the left, above, is amusing even if you’ve seen it before: Already, Nvidia’s larger than the entire Eurostoxx 50.

The company’s nearly a quarter of US Tech, 8% of the S&P 500 and ~6% of the MSCI World, SocGen’s Manish Kabra said Thursday, in a brief update. “While the first-order impact of +/-10% on Nvidia is a <1% move on SPX, we estimate almost a third of the +16% S&P 500 returns over last year have come via the AI investment cycle,” he went on.

If you ask me — and you did, implicitly, by being here — the real blight on Nvidia’s report was the cautious commentary on Huang’s controversial deal to hand the US government 15% of prospective China sales in exchange for an export license.

“Any request for a percentage of the revenue by the US government may subject us to litigation, increase our costs, and harm our competitive position and benefit competitors that are not subject to such arrangements,” Nvidia warned. Such are the perils of operating in an authoritarian country. Welcome to autocracy, enjoy your stay, as I’m fond of putting it.

Ultimately, though, it’s hard to get too bearish on a company with a veritable stranglehold on the products powering a technological epoch some speculate could be more impactful than all four historical Industrial Revolutions combined.

“[Nvidia’s] revenue guidance was clearly disappointing [but] the market has given the company multiple passes on developments that have not come to fruition,” JonesTrading’s Mike O’Rourke said, noting that even at their worst levels on Wednesday evening, the shares were merely back to where they sat last week, “a flesh wound and barely that.” Nvidia, he conceded, is “an incredible company with an organic monopoly position.”

When it was all said and done Thursday, the S&P shrugged off a small decline for Nvidia to post yet another record, the 17th new high for the benchmark in the short space of two months.