The value of the US tech company Nvidia has soared by a quarter after it predicted a boom in demand for its computer chips to meet the needs of artificial intelligence products such as ChatGPT. Nvidia's share price rose by 25% in early trading on the back of the announcement, and gave it a market valuation of more than $940bn (£760bn) after stock markets opened on Wall Street on Thursday, up from $755bn on Wednesday evening. The share price had already more than doubled over the course of 2023, amid huge optimism over the rapid progress of generative AI products. These require massive datacentres full of semiconductor chips to operate. The hype was kicked off late last year after the startup OpenAI revealed ChatGPT, a chatbot capable of producing extraordinarily human-like answers to users' queries – albeit with problems around accuracy.

It's been quiet for stocks in the final trading week of the year, as is typical, but expect volatility to return early in 2017, particularly in the retail and technology sectors, Goldman Sachs wrote on Thursday. Both groups could see big moves around the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which runs from Jan 5-8 and is a "historically stock moving event," the investment bank wrote in a note to clients. Goldman, which recently warned that January could also be volatile for health care stocks, added that the options market was not pricing in the potential moves that could result from the event. "Stocks of companies that attend and that are in the food chain have historically been volatile around this event," wrote a team of researchers led by Katherine Fogertey, an options strategist. "While only a few host formal presentations, simply having a presence at CES could be a catalyst for some stocks. We acknowledge certain presentations might be catalysts for a broader array of stocks," the firm added, citing competitors and ones that might be impacted on comments on consumer demand.