Nvidia scripts history as tech giant becomes first public company to hit $4 trillion market capitalisation

The milestone of $4 trillion market valuation reflects the upheaval being unleashed by artificial intelligence, or AI, which is widely viewed as the biggest tectonic shift in technology since Apple co-founder Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone 18 years ago, said a report by news agency AP.

The company's market value hit $4 trillion in morning trading on Wednesday, about 13 months after it had first reached the $3 trillion milestone, as per reports.

At around 7.5%, Nvidia has the biggest weight in the S&P 500, which is widely viewed by investors as the benchmark for the US stock market, according to a Reuters report.

Underscoring the changing of the guard, AI bellwether Nvidia is now worth $900 billion more than Apple, which rode the iPhone's success to become the first publicly traded company to be valued at $1 trillion, $2 trillion and eventually, $3 trillion.

Nvidia's rise has come as Apple has struggled to deliver on its ambitions to infuse the iPhone and other products with more AI with an array of new features that included a more than year-old promise to smarten up its often bumbling virtual assistant.

Apple acknowledged last month that delivering on its AI vision is going to take until at least next year, leading some industry analysts to wonder if the company will have to acquire an AI start-up to regain momentum.

In the meantime, former Apple design guru Jony Ive has joined forces with OpenAI to work on a wearable AI device that could challenge the iPhone, while Nvidia has been scrambling to meet the feverish demand for its specialised chips that power the energy-intensive data centres underlying artificial intelligence.

And tech giants Microsoft, Amazon, Google parent Alphabet and Facebook parent Meta Platforms are upping the AI ante too, collectively budgeting about $325 billion for investments in the technology this year — with a significant amount of that money likely to flow into Nvidia's coffers.

The massive demand for Nvidia's chips is the main reason behind the company's stock price surging by 10-fold since early 2023, catapulting its market value from about $400 billion to $4 trillion.

After exceeding $4 trillion for the first time early Wednesday, Nvidia's market value dipped slightly below that threshold in afternoon trading as its shares hovered around $163.

Nvidia's rapid rise also has anointed the company's founder and CEO Jensen Huang as “the godfather” of AI, whose dissertations about the technology's direction attract enraptured audiences. Huang's widening fame also has been accompanied by a fattening fortune, now estimated at $142 billion.

It looked like Nvidia may have hit a roadblock in early April when US President Donald Trump unveiled sweeping tariffs and triggered a widespread selloff in the stock market that hit the tech sector especially hard. At its nadir, Nvidia's stock price slipped below $87.

But Nvidia quickly bounced, and in late May delivered another stellar quarter, highlighted by an $18.8 billion profit, despite a $4.5 billion hit to account for US government restrictions on the sale of some of its chips to China.

The Santa Clara, California, company is scheduled to release its next quarterly report on August 27.

About Nvidia

Nvidia is an American multinational technology company that specialises in designing and manufacturing graphics processing units (GPUs), system on a chip units (SoCs), and other related technologies.

Founded in 1993, Nvidia is known for its contributions to the gaming, professional visualisation, data centre, and automotive markets, as well as its leadership in artificial intelligence (AI) and accelerated computing.